[syslinux] Bootable CD for booting of USB HDD

[Luciano Rocha]

On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 12:33:46PM -0600, Shocky wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I bought a USB hard drive, got Mandriva installed on it, and made it bootable 
> with extlinux. Works great on machines that can boot from USB. I also created 
> a boot cd using the instructions in the wiki. This is working too.
> 
> The only problem with the boot cd is that I had to copy the kernel, initrd, 
> etc. to the cd. This means that whenever I install a new kernel I'll have to 
> create and burn a new cd image. Not so burdensome I can't live with it if 
> there's no better way.
> 
> But I'm wondering if there is a way to get the cd to tell the computer to boot 
> using the kernel on the usb drive. Is such a thing possible?

Yes, if the kernel on the CD supports kexec. But then, you'll have to
make a costumized initrd that, after finding the root device, executes
the kernel and initrd there, with options extracted from extlinux.conf.

If the kernel doesn't include kexec support, you could always compile a
bare one with it, usb and ext3 support, and not much else.

> On a related note, it doesn't seem that isolinux can use the boot menu like 
> extlinux. At least I couldn't get it to work. Is this a limitation on booting 
> from cd or was I just doing something wrong again? I started by copying over 
> my working extlinux.conf to isolinux.cfg, along with the vesamenu.c32 file 
> that it references, but it seemed to ignore it.

Make sure you're using isolinux.bin from the same sources as
vesamenu.c32.

-- 
lfr
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