Anyway to boot a boot disk but use the hard drive?

Question

Just moved and left my usb and Dvds at home is there a way to work around the cd deal and use the hard drive to do it?

Answer 1

YES! You can use isolinux or grub4dos to boot an iso file using disk emulation.



Mind you that this is very complicated and may require a lot of reading.



Booting from .ISO Images



It is possible to map and boot from some CD/DVD images using Grub4dos, however it should be noted that this feature is experimental. Remember -

"The "map" process is implemented using INT 13 - any disk emulation will remain accessible from an OS that uses compatible mode disk access, e.g. DOS and Windows 9x. The emulation can't however, be accessed from an OS which uses protected mode drivers (Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, FreeBSD) once the protected mode kernel file(s) take control."



This means that there is no way (at present) to install Windows using Grub4dos ISO emulation. Also, it is not possible to boot a Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) boot disc image, unless the image is RAM disk based. RAM disk based discs include Windows PE 2/2.1 and builds that utilise ramdisk.sys and setupldr.bin files from windows 2003 server SP1 source.



There is however a workaround in some cases. You can extract the contents of the ISO into the root of the disk.



Additional:

Some CD/DVD-ROM (ISO9660) images (see exceptions above) can be mapped as the device (hd32), and booted using the following commands (replace (device)/path/file.iso with the relevant path/filename) -



map (device)/path/file.iso (hd32) [enter]

map --hook [enter]

root (hd32) [enter]

chainloader (hd32) [enter] - this can be substituted with chainloader () [enter], as the root device was set in the previous command.

boot [enter]

Answer 2

How do you "boot" something that you apparently don't have? If you don't have the boot disk, how can you boot the boot disk?

Answer 3

Your question is so stupid it hurts my brain.



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Answer 4

To do WHAT?