But how to get Grub2 on a media eg. USB-Stick in first place?

First off, you generate the appropriate El Torito boot
image for GNU GRUB2 by something like this:

$ grub-mkimage -o core.img biosdisk iso9660
$ cat /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/cdboot.img core.img >torito.img

Then you can use -b torito.img with the same options you’re
using otherwise (do *not* forget -no-emul-boot
-boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table), it doesn’t even need
to reside in the filesystem itself, as mkisofs will include
it in the appropriate place itself. (The core.img may,
however, reside at /boot/grub/ in the filesystem.)

You *must* include several other files in the filesystem
though:

$ cd /usr/lib/grub; for a in *.mod efiemu??.o command.lst \
moddep.lst fs.lst handler.lst parttool.lst; do
test -e $a && cp $a ~/cddir/boot/grub/
done

The other thing you ask for, loopback chaining, is not
possible, because grub’s loopback code will not be ac-
cessible from within the chained-to bootloader. Sorry.
You could achieve something similar with MEMDISK, but
only for relatively small images.

So with grub2, is it possible to do something like:


loopback loop (hd0,0)/myfolder/mycd.iso
chainloader (loop)


So that it would do the same thing as if booted from the CD? Because I’ve been trying to do this with grub4dos that can boot from .iso, but whenever I try to boot from a Linux distro .iso, it doesn’t work because it can’t find the data on the CD or something…

The following command:

mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso

will create the current GRUB1 boot loader on the CD (when the ISO is burned) so when the CD starts, GRUB launches and menu.lst is displayed.

So I what I need is something like this instead:

mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito_for_GRUB2 -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso

so when the ISO is burned GRUB2 loads. All I want to is to use GRUB2 as a boot loader on my CD instead of GRUB1 or isolinux.

Just for the record, this is my command if I want to use isolinux as a boot loder but I want to use GRUB2 instead.

mkisofs -o livecd.iso -r -J -l -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -V livecd -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table .

I can only suggest to look at /usr/bin/grub_mkrescue, which creates
an El Torito image by doing a 「cat cdboot.img core.img >grub_eltorito」

Be sure to include biosdisk and cd9660 modules in core.img and the
other *.mod on the CD in /boot/grub though.

(Of course, we also have a way to boot grub2 from the MirOS first
stage bootloader… not just via HD/USB, but also via El Torito…
but that’d be another topic.)

Thanks for that. To be honest, that’s kind of what I wanted all this way So far, I currently have to extract the ISO, put it its own folder and modify the cfg file to add the folder to the path. The problem is, it doesn’t always work even if you put the right entries and it’s pointing to the right files. Depending on the distro, you will get messages relating to being unable to mount thefile system etc etc…it all varies.

I still would like to know though, what would be the GRUB 2 equvilent to the command I have above? I want to use GRUB2. Do I replace stage2_eltorito with core.img?

First of, if you have /boot/grub/stage2 and stage1*, then
you have GNU grub-legacy; if you have /boot/grub/core.img
and *.mod, then you have GNU grub2.

Secondly, the method Mika writes about in here is *not*
about making an ISO bootable. It’s rather about using a
grub2 installed on the *hard disc* to load a kernel and
initrd image from within an ISO (it doesn’t matter if it
is bootable or not).

To make a bootable ISO/CD, you do things as usual. Your
current way of doing it uses grub-legacy but is just fine.

I currently use GRUB 0.9 (I think) an I am using the following command to make a bootable ISO which can be burned on a CD

mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o grub.iso iso

I got these instructions from: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/html_node/Making-a-GRUB-bootable-CD_002dROM.html

Now, I am really keen on using GRUB 2 instead so I can boot ISOs directly. Based on the mkisofs command above, what would be the equivilent for GRUB 2 so I can use GRUB 2 as a boot loader rather than GRUB 1?

Just like Jay, I have been searching and surfing the entire Google and I ended up here

P.S. How do I know what version of GRUB I have?

Too bad we can’t do that to MirOS bsd4grml, which _is_ part of
recent grml editions after all, yet. GNU GRUB2 cannot boot the
kernel (nor a stock 4.4OpenBSD one, FWIW), and while the MirOS
bootloader (ldbsd.com) is a multiboot OS kernel it doesn’t ac-
cept a module/initrd with the kernel yet. May just hack it…