Re: Booting CDs with GRUB

[John McCarthy]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Jochen Hoenicke wrote:

> On Sep 12, John McCarthy wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Is it possible to use GRUB to boot a Standard PC (El Torito)
> > bootable CDROM?
> >
> > I find myself needing boot floppies for every bootable CDROM I have
> > to allow booting the CDROM on systems without BIOS CDROM-boot
> > support.  I'm trying to find a way to have one floppy that can boot
> > any El Torito CDROM for these systems.  Is this possible?  (I'm
> > beginning to doubt it)
> 
> No that isn't possible with GRUB.  You would need a cdrom driver for
> this.  GRUB doesn't provide any disk drivers but uses the BIOS to
> access hard disk or floppy.  So it can't even access the CD-ROM unless
> the BIOS supports this.

Right.  And I'd need CDROM drivers for all the old non-ATAPI CDROMs
in the old systems I'm playing with.   Drat!  Oh well, I'll have to find
another way or just live with a box of boot floppies.

> You may try the smart boot manager at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ 
> I haven't tried it myself but it claims to have support for ATAPI
> CD-ROMS.

Thanks, it looks interesting.  Again, I don't know if the systems I'm
talking about all have ATAPI CDROMs (I hope so), but for the ones that do
this might do the trick.

Hmm, I wonder if a variation of the Scyld ``Two Kernel Monte'' boot
process would work?  It boots a full Linux kernel which then boots another
kernel.  Having a full kernel available would deal with the device support
issue, but the second stage would have to be changed to boot an El Torito
image.  I'm guessing this wouldn't work either unless the boot could
configure the BIOS to treat this as a floppy image so that BIOS calls
from the booted El Torito image boot block would find the rest of the
image as a BIOS floppy device.  I don't have the time to look into this
but it's an intersting thought.


Thanks Again,
John McC.
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