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I am wonder if there is such feature in rEFInd - to run ISO file located on the USB stick. I can not use any superuser utilities such as dd to write an ISO directly. I can only repack it.

DenisNovac
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1 Answers1

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In short, you can't boot an iso image file, but you can boot a partition that is an image of iso.

Source: As of Jul 2024, <rEFInd source tree top>/docs/refind/todo.html says loopback mount would be nice. In this comment in 2021 by Roderick W. Smith, the author of rEFInd, explicitly said so in the upstream discussion forum.

More details:

  1. rEFInd cannot use a loopback device, unlike GRUB can. This means you can not boot an iso image file stored in some filesystem, like ext4, btrfs, ntfs, etc.

  2. Instead, you can do this: Create a partion big enough, burn e.g. by dd an iso image to that partition. Using the iso9660 driver of rEFInd, you can boot that. (There is no guarantee that all isos are indeed bootable though, probably you can.)

# BTW if you can use rEFInd, why you can't use dd?

teika kazura
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