[syslinux] Chainload El Torito grub2 from syslinux from a partition table
Emilio Lazo Zaia
emiliolazozaia at gmail.com
Sat Aug 29 09:14:16 PDT 2015
Hello,
I have the following scenario:
- GPT Partitioned USB disk with syslinux (or extlinux) on the first
partition and a menu to boot each partition; all of them are iso9660
images of different linux distros,
- Before dumping every iso image into its partition space on the USB
disk I need to remaster it changing something on its initrd to be able
to coexist with other linux distros on the same USB drive,
- After that, I build a new remastered iso9660 file with mkisofs or xorriso,
- If I use xorriso, I select isohdppx.bin as the MBR file. If I use
mkisofs I need to postprocess the image with isohybrid --partok.
The menu entry on syslinux.cfg for each partition is as simple as:
Konsole output
LABEL ZeroShell
MENU LABEL ^ZeroShell
COM32 boot/syslinux/c32/chain.c32
APPEND guid:xxxxx 5
So, I'm chainloading the boot sector of an hybrid iso image dumped to a
partition.
Everything works as expected with all distros which were built to boot
with isolinux. It works because of the isohdppx.bin MBR (or the --partok
switch of isohybrid).
If the distro uses grub2 it fails because the "hybrid" grub2 images
lacks the support of booting from a partition table (right?), i.e. the
file boot_hybrid.img from grub2 *seems* not supporting booting from a
partition table. It hangs on "Booting".
There is a way to patch this behavior allowing chainloading a grub2
hybrid boot sector from a partition table using ext/syslinux? or the
solution can't be a syslinux patch and must be a new version of
boot_hybrid.img from grub2 developers?
Thanks in advance,
Emilio.
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