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Arch-Linux comes with the best recovery CD I have ever come across. Although I don't always have it with me, so I want to have it on a partition.

What I would like to do is have this CD on a partition on my hard drive that I can boot from, without having the CD with me. Because sometimes I might not have it, and the recovery kernel is broken (example: a recent mkinitcpio kernel build). Is there a way, either using dd, or another external program to write it to a partition? Or is there a way to emulate a disk with just the .ISO?

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted
  • dd will help you make the partition which is capable of making the system boot through it. We are basically doing the same thing to the USB drive to make it bootable.

  • However, you cannot tell you BIOS to boot through a partition, and hence you will need to configure your GRUB to boot through that partion using:

rootnoverify (hd0,n)
chainloader +1

Where n is the partition number.

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I use Syslinux, but I know how to configure that aswell to boot other partitions –  wolfo9999 Dec 28 '12 at 7:59
So, then point it to that partition to boot and it should work! :) –  aliasgar Dec 28 '12 at 8:04
Bacon Bits' answer is better, but just posting links to articles isnt very good, so you get best answer for atleast providing information in your own words :) –  wolfo9999 Dec 28 '12 at 8:14
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Based on this article you can use Unetbootin to accomplish this. I've never tried it myself, however.

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Unetbootin only wants to install to my existing partition, not an alternate partition –  wolfo9999 Dec 28 '12 at 16:18
@wolfo9999 if you setup the partition as a vfat filesystem, I don't see any reason why Unetbootin will complain. You might have to adjust grub/lilo bootloader to give you the options to boot from ur regular os and recovery partition... By the way, Unebootin is the shit for creating bootable usb dongles –  WeloSefer Dec 29 '12 at 8:38
Actually, it might even overwrite your main MBR so I would suggest you take a great caution with it. –  WeloSefer Dec 29 '12 at 8:46
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