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i copied this from the 5starsupport.com form, as I am a tech there, asking an advanced question here.
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Subject: write ISO file to hdd!
Windows:
Hardware: Yes
Software:
Networking:
Beginner:
Intermediate:
Advanced:
Expert: Yes
Platform: BeOS MAX v3 (yes BeOS ! )
Make:
Ram: 256
Processor: celeron 400
Megahertz:
Hard Drive: many hdds
Name: Mr X
Email:
confirm:
Country: Canada
Referred by: i am a tech here.
First Visit:
Second Visit:
Third +: Yes
Remote Name:
Remote User:
HTTP User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (BeOS; U; BeOS BePC; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040906 Firefox/0.9.3
Date: January 15, 2005
Time: 10:22 PMProblem:
Hey computing.net people. this is an advanced question, could require some university education to answer or what not. the task is to take an ISO image, and 'burn' it to an hdd, hence the hdd should work exactly as the cd does. maybe this could be done in commandline with linux, but im not sure about that. the file getting written to the hdd is memtest86 3.2 . since i have lots of old hdd's like 2GB and such, eventually if i can find this possible, is to have many ISO's written onto hdd's and have like a LILO thing at the beginning that lets you select which ISO to load.
Diagnose/troubleshooting:
hope you can figure this one out. but dont spend to much time researching, because i already did, and i didnt find anything. searched google with things like
'write iso +to hdd' 'ISO +to hdd'
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and no, im not confused im not trying to burn iso to cd media. just a bootable iso format file onto an hdd, or even thumbdrive, as long as it acts the same way as a cd does. hope you can help!
ps- it is my birthday today, so that gives you an excuse to try extra hard for me ;)
I think what you want to do, is really difficuly, because in order to access the iso, you need to already be running some kind of software (I am sure you know all this!).
But... if you could get a dos startup or linux startup software on your thumb drive and boot from USB, then have an ISO selector, you'd be in business. I can see the benefits of this, good luck, should be doable and cool!
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If you somehow write the iso to hdd, you will almost surely have a mess.
The OS will read the media desriptor byte and think it's a CD. But it ain't.
M2
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>> the hdd should work exactly as the cd does. <<
Unfortunately, they don't. As Mechanic2go says, you will have problems with the media descriptor byte. The OS will try to read the hard disk as a CD and get totally confused.
The best you can do is to extract the files from the ISO and write them to the hard disk and make the hard disk bootable with the OS you intend to use.
http://www.undisker.com/iso-extractor.html
Stuart
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Maybe I'm missing the point here. Again!
Why would you want the install memtest86 as an ISO onto a hard drive. It's meant to be installed onto a floppy disk and need to operate independant of an operating system.
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Rimfire,
Yea, an inquiring mind might wonder why anyone would dedicate a HD to a job which can run from floppy.
M2
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good replies guys.
i knew that i was going to have problems with the 'media descriptor' and mbr, but i wanst sure. something that would work out tho, is a simple stripped down OS thats only good for booting to a promt; maybe DamnSmallLinux?, and asking you which ISO type bootable cd to load. just think about this- wouldnt it be great, instead of having 10 or so bootable cd's, just put them on your hdd, and then you can just select which one to load on boot up? huh? oh and this is what a fellow tech wrote me on 5star:
Hello Mr X,
You pose an interesting question/dilemma. I am not a Linux expert, but have run into problems with ISO files before. The usual result is one large continuous ISO file which will not mount or run on anything. I can tell you that I am pretty good with hardware, Windows, and 3rd party software. I have solved this Linux problem for myself and a few friends, and may have a solution for you if you can network your machine to one running Windows 2000 or Windows XP pro, or have access to one. I know I have successfully converted these ISO files to direct CD images complete with all the file folders separate and intact, including auto run, help files, etc. which can then be installed and run on most any machine, or the CD image file can be copied to a HD and run from there. Let me know if you think I may be able to help. My most complex success is for a friend who wanted to be able to run his choice of Slackware, Linux 8.0, Red Hat 9.0 or Mandrake 10.0 all from the same machine. It works fine. You situation sounds like it may be similar to some extent. Believe it or not, using my machine running Win2k and some CD burning software was the answer. It may sound weird, but it works. Let me know.
Dave
5Star Support
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