Install Linux from an iso image under Windows

This article will help you install any Linux distribution from a Windows machine directly from an iso image on your hard drive. This article can help netbook owners, as well as those who, for whatever reason, can not use the usual installation disk.

Install Grub4Dos

To get started, download Grub4Dos. At the time of writing, the latest stable release was Grub4Dos 0.4.4 .

Win XP / 2000

• Unpack grldr and menu.lst from the archive to the root of the disk with Windows installed.
• Editing boot.ini . You may need to remove the “read only” attribute in order to be able to save the file.
  

  attrib -r boot.ini

• At the end of the file, add
  

  C: \ grldr = "Grub4Dos"

Win Vista / 7

• Unpack grldr , grldr.mbr and menu.lst from the archive to the root of the disk with Windows installed.
• We launch the console as administrator and execute
  

  bcdedit / create / d "Grub4Dos" / application bootsector

• In response to the previous command, we get the id of the created record, which we substitute in the next three
  

  bcdedit / set {id} device partition = C:
  bcdedit / set {id} path \ grldr.mbr
  bcdedit / displayorder {id} / addlast
  

More detailed installation instructions for Grub4Dos can be found here .

Edit menu.lst

Add a new item to the bootloader menu

title boot installer
fallback 1
root (hd0,1)
kernel / vmlinuz vga = normal ramdisk_size = 14972 root = / dev / rd / 0 rw -
initrd /initrd.gz

Here we substitute the disk number and partition number to yours. If Ubuntu is installed, then you can download ( amd64 ) the necessary images of vmlinuz and initrd.gz . In other cases, they can be found in the iso-image of the distribution itself. For reference, I give a small table of names in different distributions

Ubuntu	vmlinuz	initrd.gz
Debian	vmlinuz	initrd.gz
Fedora	vmlinuz	initrd.img
Mandriva	vmlinuz	all.rdz
openSUSE	linux	initrd
Slackware	bzImage	initrd.img
Gentoo	gentoo	gentoo.igz

Now copy the iso-image of the distribution package to the resulting heap and reboot.

Installation

Perhaps the installation is somewhat different in different distributions. I will cover installation using Ubuntu as an example.

After rebooting, a new item will appear in the Download Manager. Select


Grub4Dos bootloader appears. Select “Boot Installer”. The


installer will prompt you to select a language. We choose our great and mighty.


Perhaps the installer will not be able to find the image on his own.


In this case, you need to restart the search from the main menu and specify the location manually.

After selecting the image, a few more familiar windows will appear and installation will begin.

Edit menu.lst. Option # 2

Alternative menu.lst is also possible.

title boot installer
fallback 1
find --set-root / image_name.iso
map / image_name.iso (0xff) || map --mem / image_name.iso (0xff)
map --hook
chainloader (0xff)
savedefault --wait = 2

Here, no additional gestures are required - the familiar Ubuntu installer will load.


Since the image is loaded from the hard drive, I advise you to select a section for the OS and swap before starting the installation.