If problems occur booting your system using a boot manager or if the boot manager cannot be installed on the MBR of your hard disk or a floppy disk, it is also possible to create a bootable CD with all the necessary start-up files for Linux. This requires a CD writer installed in your system.
Creating a bootable CD-ROM with GRUB merely requires a special form of
stage2 called stage2_eltorito
and,
optionally, a customized menu.lst
. The classic
files stage1
and
stage2
are not required.
Create a directory in which to create the ISO image, for example, with
cd /tmp
and
mkdir iso
.
Also create a subdirectory for GRUB with
mkdir -p iso/boot/grub
.
Copy the file stage2_eltorito
into the directory
grub
:
cp /usr/lib/grub/stage2_eltorito iso/boot/grub
Also copy the kernel (/boot/vmlinuz
), the
initrd
(/boot/initrd
), and the file
/boot/message
to iso/boot/
:
cp /boot/vmlinuz iso/boot/ cp /boot/initrd iso/boot/ cp /boot/message iso/boot/
To make them available to GRUB, copy the file
menu.lst
to iso/boot/grub
and adjust
the path entries to make
them point to a CD-ROM device. Do this by replacing the device name of
the hard disks, listed in the format (hd*)
, in the
pathnames with the device
name of the CD-ROM drive, which is (cd)
:
gfxmenu (cd)/boot/message timeout 8 default 0 title Linux kernel (cd)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda5 vga=794 resume=/dev/hda1 splash=verbose showopts initrd (cd)/boot/initrd
Finally, create the ISO image with the following command:
mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot \ -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso
Then write the resulting file grub.iso
to a CD
using your preferred utility.