Make a rescue disk boot from the HDD: How?

[H4ckRn00b]

To be less vague: How do I make a rescue disk a boot option on the old HDD in a separate partition?
There are several rescue disks going around. Now, I thought it would be useful to make a multiboot system, with a rescue disk as one of the boot options on a HDD or SSD. As far as my limited knowledge goes, that would involve changing whatever GRUB or SYSLINUX is, into MBR/UEFI thingies.

Yes, my knowledge is YUGELY limited.............

Does anyone have any idea how to do that? For starters, how do I figure out which flavor the rescue disks (or rather, ISO's for USBs) are? Grub? syslinux? What are those anyways?

And yes, yes, I know that putting rescue disks on the HDD kind of defeats the purpose, it's the polar opposite, but that also is the challenge.

Thanks!!

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

There is several ways to setup a system to do rescue of a computer. If the computer is running windows 10 then you are better not mucking with the boot options. One way is to use this software to make a bootable USB drive. This allows you to add iso's to the usb drive and boot them selecting from a menu. The web pages for the program have heaps of info on getting iso's to run.

http://www.easy2boot.com/download/

Some iso's I would put on the pendrive all the iso's for the different windows versions , A couple of live linux iso's , Like puppy linux and Parted Magic ( this is not free) and a couple of versions of  hirens boot disk from here  https://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/     get the lastest version and say version 9.8.

[H4ckRn00b]

Thanks for replying, it makes clear that I wasn't. Clear. I should've said explicitly that my goal isn't about rescuing, it's about getting YET another boot option. I already have rescue usb's coming out of my ears. Several multi boot subs, even. Not my tempo.

[nil]

Many Linux distributions create this option when you install the operating system, allowing you to boot into a limited operation mode with root access. From there you can mount your other partitions and block devices, try to start a network, etc.

In general, you can install any bootable operating system on any partition of your attached storage devices. Just pick the one you want, install it to the partition, then create an entry for that partition in your bootloader.

However, what you want to do might not be worthwhile or necessary, or the functionality you're looking for might already be built into your operating system. I'm not sure, because you haven't described your system in any specific terms. I don't know what OS you're using, what computing architecture, etc.

If you have specific software you want to use, and it's not working for you, or you don't know how to do it, feel free to post it in this thread and I'm sure someone will chime in.

[H4ckRn00b]

Thanks for reacting.

Many Linux distributions create this option when you install the operating system

Sure. However, I was looking at Windows  ISOs, like the usual rescue disks: Hirens, Strelec and Gandalf, and they do not offer that.

Just pick the one you want, install it to the partition,

Thanks for going right to the heart of the matter: HOW do I do that?

However, what you want to do might not be worthwhile

Well, I don't wanna talk about religious differences.

or the functionality you're looking for might already be built into your operating system.

That is kind of the point for multibooting. At least IMHO....

[nil]

Thanks for providing some specifics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the main thing you're trying to accomplish is to eliminate the removable disk from the equation. You want to be able to do the same thing as booting from a removable rescue disk, but from a partition on your hard disk.

If you were on Linux, you could use dd to write an image directly to a partition, byte for byte.

https://www.computerhope.com/unix/dd.htm

To my knowledge the closest equivalent on Windows is a program called Win32 Disk Imager. I've never used it, so I can't recommend it personally, but it sounds like it will do the trick (write an image byte for byte directly to a partition).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

After you have written the desired ISO to a partition on your disk (careful, it will destroy all data on that partition! Don't accidentally overwrite your Windows partition, for example) you need to add an entry to your Win10 bootloader that points to that partition.

This Microsoft document appears to contain the information you would need to do that.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/adding-boot-entries

I hope this info helps.

Edit: if you are looking for a disk partitioning program, I highly recommend GParted Live. (this one you want to put on a removable disk.)

https://gparted.org/livecd.php

Make sure that the partition you create for your rescue software has enough space to hold the ISO. The destination partition can be bigger, but not smaller, than the ISO size. I'd recommend leaving a little extra space on the partition just to be safe. For instance, if your ISO is 8 GB, I'd create a partition at least 9 or 10 GB in size, unless you can't spare those extra few gigabytes.