On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Niall Young wrote: > On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote: > > > At Wed, 13 Nov 2002 11:32:07 +0100, > > Herbert Szumovski wrote: > > > I thought CD's are not supported by Grub (neither for putting > > > Grub on a bootable CD with iso filesystem nor for booting a CD > > > in any way) ? > > > > That's right. That has been in TODO for years. > > There are posts in the archive suggesting that Grub can boot a CD > if the BIOS supports it as a boot device?
Ok - I've finally got what I needed so if you're interested: My aim is to have a bootable CD that can be left in the drive permanently. Kinda like Knoppix, but it does a HD install automatically and you leave the CD in the drive after reboot. The CD itself will store a customised FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/) NFSROOT along with the subset of Debian GNU/Linux packages that I require. It's basically a non-interactive installer for Debian - it installs the base system along with any extra packages and customisations that you need as part of a defined class. PXE/DHCP isn't an option for me, hence leaving the CD in the drive permanently as I don't have physical access to the machine. Read-only media should help to keep the machine secure, instead of relying on an upstream package repository that could have trojans. So along comes a new machine, we plonk in a CD and when it boots it'll try the HD first and if this fails it'll use Grub's fallback option to boot the CD, perform a new installation, reboot and then succeed on the default HD boot. If you want to rebuild the machine from scratch, delete the kernel or partition table and reboot - a new machine will be up in a few minutes accepting connections. Hopefully FAI and this boot mechanism can be incorporated into the debian-installer so official Debian CDs can do this out of the box one day. You have to build an El Torito bootable CD with a HD image instead of an iso9660 filesystem. Thanks to Thierry and mkbimage, now onto FAI... Niall Young Chime Communications Pty Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace Ph: 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797 Perth, Western Australia 6000 "there's a lot of movement in my trousers at the moment" -- Dennis Kristofich, Sep 2002 _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub