Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility

Re:Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility by motiejus on Friday May 07, 2021 @06:53AM (#27074506)

Are you referring to grub2iso[1]? If so, I was never able to make it work: either the ISO is too large (IIRC, in the old days it needed to load the full ISO to memory), or, if it did boot, the kernel wouldn't find the ISO ("virtual drive") itself.

I only got it to work with simple things that load fully from RAM -- say, debian-installer, which only requires kernel+initrd.

It has to be simple and reliable. If it's only one of them, I would rather carry an extra USB stick which I can always format (I do).

[1]: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

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Re:Rufus: Reliable USB Formatting Utility by dataflow on Friday May 07, 2021 @07:22AM (#27074674)

It was painful but I got Ubuntu ISO working with

  loopback loop (hd0,gpt1)/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  set root=(loop)
  configfile /boot/grub/loopback.cfg

which in turn seems to load the kernel via

  linux  /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed iso-scan/filename=/PATH/TO/UBUNTU.iso
  initrd /casper/initrd

if you just make sure your path doesn't have spaces. (I forget if you also need to pass boot=casper or not.)

You'll have to detect the disk though. It's possible to automate it somewhat, but not trivial (at least if you don't know how). You'll want to use search. https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub/html_node/sear...

And make sure you've insmod'ed any modules you need for your hardware if necessary (storage, USB, etc.)... unfortunately documentation on these is poor, and some modules are mutually exclusive, so have fun.

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