0

is it possible to write a Linux install image(from ISO) to a hard disk and boot it from that? I would like to be able to boot the hard disk and install the O.S. from it rather than burning a CD.

1
  • Why don't you install from USB?
    – Cornelius
    Jun 21, 2014 at 13:46

2 Answers 2

2

Yes, just like you can install from USB (Which is the preferred method, see Unetbootin). You'll want to use the FAT32/exFAT file system for this, and you will need the bootloader on the hard drive to be able to boot into the installation media.

If you already have linux installed this should be easy to do with grub (granted you have grub 2 like most users) if you extract the contents of the live cd/dvd image to a partition and then run

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

or (depends on distro)

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

It may help to have os-prober installed if grub doesn't auto detect your partition normally. You can also boot directly from the ISO but it is a bit harder.

If you're on Windows and are booting from Windows' bootmgr things will probably be significantly harder (as in I have never tried this) unless you have two hard drives. If you have two hard drives you can probably just use Unetbootin as if the drive was an USB stick (the premise seems to be the same)

The reason it is hard, or for a proper term, more risky if you only have one hard drive is that each drive only has one MBR which can be booted from, and what is written there determines what happens when you boot from the drive, if you would write to the MBR to boot from the live dvd partition with Unetbootin like I suggested above, you would not be able to boot back into Windows until you have another boot manager installed to the drive (like GRUB which with os-prober can auto-detect windows for you when you run the command I named above, most Linux installations will do this for you automatically without you needing to worry about it though) but I have not tried using Unetbootin to write to a hard drive. Make sure to check before you use it if it will wipe out all your hard drive partitions or not when you use it.

The alternative to MBR (and bootloaders) is UEFI which uses an EFI partition that the BIOS can boot directly from, this I have found to be significantly more complicated to deal with for an average user than the oldschool MBR method and most users don't need the specialized features of UEFI anyways.

Unetbootin only officially supports a selection of distros. However in theory it should run other distros as well if you have the ISO. If it fails you then there are alternatives to it like Universal USB Installer and Linux Live USB Creator

And finally, do not forget that you need to have a free unpartitioned space on your hard drive to install linux onto. This can be done from Windows' disk management utility by shrinking an existing partition, then writing the new live partition in a piece of the new free space, then (leaving at least 30GB for linux depending on distro), install from the live partition to the remaining free space then booting back to windows, erasing the live partition after you successfully installed from it and end it by deleting that partition and extending the windows partition with it (so you will not be left with a gap of free space in your partition table)

-1

Yes I believe you can. You can use this program in the link below. http://www.ezbsystems.com/ultraiso/

1
  • Writing to CD and to Hard drive are entirely different things, UltraISO most likely can not write data to the MBR or an EFI partition of a hard drive and therefore even if you can copy the contents of an image to a hard drive with ultraiso, you could not boot from it unless you already have a versatile bootloader installed (like grub 2) But Daemon Tools would be just as good a tool to copy the contents of the image, or good old Win Rar.
    – Cestarian
    Jun 21, 2014 at 14:40

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .