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Instead of going to the BIOS every time, I'd like to add an entry in grub menu to boot the CD-ROM.

Best definitive way of doing this ?

Gzorg
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    most folk just leave CDROM as the first boot device in the BIOS and the boot drive as second. the BIOS will skip over the CD drive if it's empty. any particular reason you've been changing the BIOS each time? – quack quixote Oct 21 '09 at 20:24
  • I do that too. But why grub wouldn't be able to do it ? It can boot from the network, does chaining... why not the CD-ROM ? – Gzorg Oct 21 '09 at 21:48
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    One reason to not let the BIOS do this is because it can sometimes drastically make the boot process slower (at least by about 1-5 seconds if there is something inside the drive). – Albert Jun 18 '10 at 14:30
  • @Gzorg, please accept the answer if it has helped you. This helps other users as well. – MERose Apr 27 '15 at 21:56

2 Answers2

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Step 1: Download the memdisk.bin from here or if you have syslinux installation, you can use the installed memdisk.bin.

Step 2: Download the sbootmgr.dsk from here or if you have any version of Slackware CD-1, /isolinux/sbootmgr/sbootmgr.dsk file you can use.

Step 3: Copy both memdisk.bin and sbootmgr.dsk in your grub existing grub installation path, /boot/grub.

Step 4: Add the following entry in your existing grub menu. Note: root(hd0,0) should be according to your configuration.

title CDROM

root(hd0,0)

kernel /boot/grub/memdisk.bin

initrd /boot/grub/sbootmgr.dsk

Step 5: I hope you need not to run grub-install again. If necessary you can do.

Step 6: Reboot the machine.

Step 7: You can see an entry called CDROM in grub menu list. Select the entry. You will be shown boot device selection screen showing all your harddisk and CDROM drives. Insert your bootable CDROM in the CD Drive and select that drive from menu. Waavv..!! your machine is booted from that CD.

Source

itsadok
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    I saw this too, but I didn't know whether I should trust a third party thing like this. Given the disclaimer and the warnings one can find here http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~bernhard/grub-chain-cd.html...

    So I tried, and ... it hangs at "Loading boot sector... booting..."

     – Gzorg Oct 21 '09 at 21:55
  • Is this information from https://cutecomputer.wordpress.com/2006/10/10/boot-cdrom-through-grub/? It seems so, because your posts dates three years later. – MERose Apr 27 '15 at 22:03
  • Links broken, doesn't work anymore. It looks to be possible with a slackware cd. – Wilf Apr 12 '16 at 16:15
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Try this:

title Boot from CD
cdrom --init
map --hook
chainloader (cd0)
boot

(I added boot command at the and line)

xoid
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dma_k
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