I want to do it because I want to install Windows 7 and my BIOS menu doesn't appear; it skips to grub2 menu at start, but that's another story.. Is there a way to boot the Windows 7 installation iso directly from grub2?

1. Grub4dos Iso
2. Grub4dos Linux Iso
3. Grub4dos Iso Image Emulation

Apr 08, 2018  Just like previous versions, you can boot Kaspersky Rescue Disk 2018 ISO from Grub2 and Grub4dos. It supports booting in both UEFI and Legacy modes. Just like previous versions, you can boot Kaspersky Rescue Disk 2018 ISO from Grub2 and Grub4dos. It supports booting in both UEFI and Legacy modes.

3 Answers

Yeah, you'd think something like this would work:

1. Successfully booting ISO image files with Grub4dos - posted in Grub4dos: Some thoughts about successfully booting ISO image files with Grub4dos (G4D)Prerequisites:1. ISO image file is bootable at all (keywords: emulation or no-emulation boot).2. ISO image file is on a G4D aware storage medium (Floppy, CD, Harddisk) with (sufficient large) file.
2. Chenall / grub4dos. Pull requests 0. Projects 0 Wiki Insights Dismiss Join GitHub today. GitHub is home to over 28 million developers working together to host and review code, manage projects, and build software together.

But Windows will just balk at that.

If you happen to have at least 4GB RAM, you can opt to load the whole DVD iso in memdisk and boot off that. To do that, download SysLinux and extract the memdisk file into your boot directory. Then you need to add code to Grub2 something like this

However, I'm not going to even test the code, as putting 3+ GB of data into RAM is just plain wrong (from an idealogical standpoint). No, I really wanted what you want, but in the end I put the Windows install on a partition on a USB using the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool and chainloaded to that. Sorry there doesn't seem to be any other way that I can see.

Technically installing from windows's .iso file can't be possible. You can boot from the .iso using grub but after that Windows will loss contact with the mounted location or it is not capable of it. So both grub & Windows should aware of mount and boot. Currently Windows doesn't support.

So you need to extract/copy the content of .iso to root of a partition and then chain-load into it using grub.

Booting Windows XP with grub4dos

Booting the actual ISO with grub legacy or grub2 won't work, but with older windows versions (i.e. XP) it is possible to unpack the i386 folder from the ISO to the USB stick, and then use grub4dos to call the bootloader:

or

This won't work with newer windows versions or with newer hardware.

Booting Windows 7 with grub2

With grub2 apparently something like this could work for Windows 7:

Option A assumes your bootable USB stick/HDD is the first device and has a msdos style partition table. Adjust to match your configuration. If your boot device has a GPT partition table, then most likely you'll need to use (hd0,gpt1) (GPT in general is trickier to set up).

Option B uses the drive's unique UUID, which can be seen on Linux with sudo blkid or on OSX with e.g. diskutil info disk0s1 (or Disk Utility > Info).

The final entry might look for example like this:

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged grub2windowsisobios or ask your own question.

How can I boot into an ISO file in GRUB? The ISO file is on a reiserfs partition and GRUB can access it (already tested that).

2 Answers

Grub4dos Iso

The biggest problem with booting an ISO file is that ISOs that are designed to be booted are almost always designed to be booted from a CD. As explained on Marco's blog regarding Grub 2 (emphasis mine):

GRUB can read ISO9660 (”iso”) images. It can for example load the first few sectors and boot it. But most people do not realize is “what then?”. What would the loaded operating system do? It will most likely look for a CDROM, which it won’t find, and fail.

So the dead-simple-est way to boot from some random ISO file is to load it into a virtual machine (VirtualBox, VMware, or Virtual PC) as a virtual CD and boot it there. That should almost always work, because to the VM, it's not an ISO file -- it's a real CD on real CD hardware.

Booting from an ISO file on bare metal is much harder. How you do this depends on which version of Grub you're using, and results can differ depending on what ISO you're using and how it was configured to boot. This is why most boot-ISO-from-USB tools (Unetbootin, WinToFlash, etc) usually extract the ISO contents to the drive -- because that way they can be accessed directly, without confusing the OS being booted.

Grub 1

.. not sure. If possible, menu entries will probably look a lot like Grub4DOS, though I think the 'map --hook' command is a Grub4DOS enhancement. On the plus side, Grub has wider filesystem support than Grub4DOS.

A note on Grub with reiserfs (unconfirmed) indicates you 'have to mount your partition with notail for it to work'.

Memdisk is an option; see below.

Grub4DOS

Grub4DOS offers some experimental 'CD emulation' that works with some ISOs. Unfortunately, Grub4DOS only reads FAT32/NTFS filesystems. Download Grub4DOS.

Here's a sample entry (source):

Supposedly the Win7 ISO can be booted with this entry:

Other ISOs can be booted with Memdisk:

You can also use a menu configurator like MultiBootISOs.exe from PenDriveLinux. Place ISOs on the flash drive, and run the utility to install the bootloader and configure the boot menu.

Here's a Hak5 episode on installing Grub4DOS.

Grub 2

Here's a couple of example Grub2 entries. chainloader doesn't work to boot an ISO at present, so these entries must (1) use loopback to 'mount' the ISO, and (2) add something like iso-scan or findiso to the linux line that specifies the ISO file.

Unfortunately, there's no generic way to do this. Each different boot entry must be customized to the target ISO's contents. Most Linux LiveCDs use ISOLINUX as a bootloader; find the isolinux.cfgPlay resident evil 2 online. and examine that boot entry to see what it usually boots.

Grub4dos Linux Iso

Example entries (source): Crystal reports viewer windows 10.

Grub4dos Iso Image Emulation

If you're trying to boot a non-Linux LiveCD, you may be out of luck. Again, Memdisk may help:

You can use dd from the terminal to write an iso file to a partition. Just be careful, if you use dd wrong you can wipe everything. It should look something like this:dd if=Desktop/LinuxCDFile.iso of=/Path/To/Partition

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged bootgrubiso-image or ask your own question.