So there’s been quite a few new releases of distributions recently. Last month, there’s been Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9. This month it’s Fedora 13. Anyway, I just updated my live boot drive with all of those and everything works pretty well.

Well, I’ve been trying to boot Fedora from ISO, but haven’t exactly been successful. On the bug, you can see a possible fix, but it’s a bit complicated and requires messing with the image from an existing install. Instead, I figured out a way to do it that uses the extracted files. It’s pretty simple. First, mount the ISO and extract three files: the LiveOS image: squashfs.img and possibly osmin.

So, I’m still trying to figure out the Fedora boot, but in the meantime, I tried to figure out how to boot from a few recovery systems. First off, let’s try Parted Magic. This one is pretty simple since they provide a “USB” version. If you extract that, you’ll find a boot and a pmagic folder. Copy the pmagic folder to the USB drive. In boot/grub/grub.lst, you’ll find a whole bunch of boot options.

Last time I managed to boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint from ISO pretty easily. Unfortunately, Fedora does not work so simply. There is no iso-scan parameter that can be used for it. Fedora uses Dracut to create its initramfs infrastructure. From that page, I found the rdshell parameter that could be added to the kernel command line to get into a shell before switching to the real root and init. Once there, I was able to mount the USB drive, then the ISO, and finally the actual live image.

Last time I prepared the USB drive to boot from ISO. That’s great, but it’s no good if there are no ISOs to boot into. First off, I set up Ubuntu in GRUB. Fortunately, this was pretty easy to do. Ubuntu supports booting from ISO using the iso-scan kernel parameter. Since Linux Mint is derived from Ubuntu, it also supports this parameter. The following lines in the GRUB2 config will enable booting from a Ubuntu/Linux Mint ISO.

Recently, I got a 1TB USB drive. I was planning on using this just for backups, but quite frankly, it’s so big there’s no need to limit it to just that. So I decided I’d put a few live CD images on it somehow to get a sort of universal test drive. I set aside about 30G which is way overkill, but in GiB, it meant the remaining was a round 900 (darn GB vs GiB thing).