Running LiveCDs From Your Hard Drive

LiveCDs can be tested by copying the data to a folder on your existing Linux installation and run from your hard drive. While all liveCDs are a little different in how they are structured, the basic principles of making this work are the same:


 * 1) Download the iso to your computer
 * 2) Mount the iso and extract the contents to your hard drive
 * 3) Add an entry to grub
 * 4) Reboot and test

For this example, we will be testing Musix 1.0r2 on an existing Debian Lenny installation.

Download the iso
First, download the iso. The Musix iso we are using can be found here.

Mount/extract the iso
As root, create a directory where we can put the contents of the iso: mkdir /mnt/iso

Now, mount the downloaded iso: mount -o loop -t iso9660 MusixGNU+Linux1.0r2_Stable.iso /mnt/iso

Now we have the contents of the iso available to us: cd /mnt/iso ls autorun.bat autorun.inf  autorun.pif  boot  Formas_inicio.html  index.html  KNOPPIX  wiki-images