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.
Procedure 9.6. Creating Boot CDs
Change into a directory in which to create the ISO image, for example:
cd /tmp
Create a subdirectory for GRUB:
mkdir -p iso/boot/grub
Copy the kernel, the files stage2_eltorito
,
initrd
, menu.lst
, and
message
to iso/boot/
:
cp /boot/vmlinuz iso/boot/ cp /boot/initrd iso/boot/ cp /boot/message iso/boot/ cp /usr/lib/grub/stage2_eltorito iso/boot/grub cp /boot/grub/menu.lst iso/boot/grub
Adjust the path entries in iso/boot/grub/menu.lst
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
x,y
)(cd)
. You may also need to adjust the paths to the
kernel and the initrd—they need to point to
/boot/vmlinuz
and /boot/initrd
,
respectively. After having made the adjustments,
menu.lst
should look similar to the following example:
timeout 8 default 0 gfxmenu (cd)/boot/message title Linux root (cd) kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda5 vga=794 resume=/dev/sda1 \ splash=verbose showopts initrd /boot/initrd
Use splash=silent
instead of
splash=verbose
to prevent the boot messages from appearing
during the boot procedure.
Create the ISO image with the following command:
mkisofs -R -b iso/boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot \ -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso /tmp/iso
Write the resulting file grub.iso
to a CD using your
preferred utility. Do not burn the ISO image as data file, but use the
option for burning a CD image in your burning utility.