Hot answers tagged

26 votes
Accepted

Is this possible to boot an OS from some kind of a file?

Yes, that's more or less how every Linux "live USB" system works. They all boot from a read-only filesystem image (often a .squashfs file). The bootloader is not really involved (it gets out ...
u1686_grawity's user avatar
7 votes

Is this possible to boot an OS from some kind of a file?

Yes, this is entirely possible, and the following is one way of doing it. In Windows, you could have an entire disk with its file-system stored in a .vhdx or a .vhd file. Then you can use diskpart to ...
harrymc's user avatar
  • 459k
5 votes

Is this possible to boot an OS from some kind of a file?

You might find the BeOS Personal Edition interesting. Released in 2000, this was a free version of the BeOS operating system that installed on a Windows 95/98 system. The OS image itself was simply ...
bta's user avatar
  • 746
4 votes

Is this possible to boot an OS from some kind of a file?

Other answers describe what you probably were thinking of. This answer deliberately describes some concepts in a way you most likely did not think of. Consider a different view; consider these facts: ...
Kamil Maciorowski's user avatar
1 vote

How to boot system normally from grub prompt?

The grub command prompt and grub configuration language are both basically the same. The simple way you can find out how to do this will be to read the menuenry {} from the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg. ...
Philip Couling's user avatar
1 vote

How to boot system normally from grub prompt?

The command normal should return to the menu. You should probably do this before manually unlocking the volume, as it's likely not smart enough to "resume" – it'll only you reinvoke the ...
u1686_grawity's user avatar
1 vote

configure grub to work with either UEFI or PC BIOS boot

Right now, I have to run grub2-install --target=x86_64-efi before moving the disk to a UEFI system and grub2-install --target=i386-pc before moving to a legacy PC BIOS system. That works fine (...
u1686_grawity's user avatar
1 vote

Is this possible to boot an OS from some kind of a file?

grub2 can boot from any ISO file that are setup as Casper bootable. The default Live ISO Ubuntu is Casper-compatible ISO, for example, and I've actually done this a couple times to have grub boot ...
Lie Ryan's user avatar
  • 4,527
1 vote

Boot failed - Initramfs dropped shell with NVMe disks not present

Had a similar issue. It turned out that a NVME boot required one of the modules from the linux-modules-extra-* package. So I had to do a boot from Ubuntu-Live-Image, open a shell, and do about this: ...
Harald Wilhelmi's user avatar

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible