10/22/2020 GNU GRUB Manual 2.

04: Making a GRUB bootable CD-ROM

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4.2 Making a GRUB bootable CD-ROM

GRUB supports the no emulation mode in the El Torito specification6. This means that you can use the whole
CD-ROM from GRUB and you don’t have to make a floppy or hard disk image file, which can cause
compatibility problems.

For booting from a CD-ROM, GRUB uses a special image called cdboot.img, which is concatenated with
core.img. The core.img used for this should be built with at least the ‘iso9660’ and ‘biosdisk’ modules. Your
bootable CD-ROM will usually also need to include a configuration file grub.cfg and some other GRUB
modules.

To make a simple generic GRUB rescue CD, you can use the grub-mkrescue program (see Invoking grub-
mkrescue):

$ grub-mkrescue -o grub.iso

You will often need to include other files in your image. To do this, first make a top directory for the bootable
image, say, ‘iso’:

$ mkdir iso

Make a directory for GRUB:

$ mkdir -p iso/boot/grub

If desired, make the config file grub.cfg under iso/boot/grub (see Configuration), and copy any files and
directories for the disc to the directory iso/.

Finally, make the image:

$ grub-mkrescue -o grub.iso iso

This produces a file named grub.iso, which then can be burned into a CD (or a DVD), or written to a USB
mass storage device.

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The root device will be set up appropriately on entering your grub.cfg configuration file, so you can refer to
file names on the CD without needing to use an explicit device name. This makes it easier to produce rescue
images that will work on both optical drives and USB mass storage devices.

Next: Device map, Previous: Installing GRUB using grub-install, Up: Installation [Contents][Index]

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