 the quality of this video I as I always say I hate filming the screen with a camera but I want to show this running on a real machine not in a virtual machine I have a flash drive here my laptop's off I'm going to turn it on and I'm going to choose my boot device on my particular computer it's by hitting F12 at boot time but of course that varies from machine to machine and I am going to choose to boot from USB and what's on this flash drive is an installation of grub with an ISO file ISO file is a live version of Debian you see I have two options in here because I've configured grub in two different ways I'm going to hit E to go into edit mode for this first one here to show you so we're sending some parameters you can see that I'm setting the ISO file the ISO file in this particular case is in the root folder of my USB flash drive but it could be placed in a sub folder if you want to put your ISOs in to separate folders so they're not clearing up the root directory if you're going to use the USB drive for other things and then the loop back loop and then the ISO so we're setting a variable called ISO file and it's pointing to the ISO file and then we're using that that variable so you could write right here you could write Debian dot slash Debian ISO but we're getting a variable because we're using that in two different places so it's easier if you yeah use a variable as normal so what's happening here is grub is going to be mounting this ISO file and then within that ISO file it's going to find the Linux kernel that's why that says Linux there and in Debian it's well here it's going to be on a loop back device it's going to be on this device in a folder called live and it's called VM L I N U Z 1 there's a another kernel on this distribution which has the same thing but two at the end because there's more than one boot option in there and one's the installer this is for the live distribution I've done tutorials before on booting stuff like this and I'm drawing a blank I always thought say sys linux or sys lin or something like that is what's a different bootloader you can use and when you get the ISO it has a config file in there I've shown previous videos so you get this information from there but let's go over this so we're loading up the links kernel with some boot options that live and configure I got that out of the off the live CD there and we're saying from ISO we're saying that the ISO file again here is under dev and it's on the second hard drive sdb and the first partition and the ISO file and they were loading up the initial RAM disk from that same drive under that folder live and as in it ram 1.img in the case of Debian of course you have to look at what's on the ISO to figure out what's to put in the grub config file so what's happening here is grub boots and grub is what mounts your ISO file once it's mounted it's mounted like any other drive and you just have to point the bootloader to the proper kernel and give it the proper parameters that you want and the initial RAM disk now this was my first solution looking at stuff online I'm not that great with with grub I mean it looks so simple but you do one thing wrong and it won't boot properly but this is from ISO here and I'm pointing it directly to the ISO on a particular hard drive this will cause problems if you have multiple hard drives sorry for the blurriness there if you have multiple hard drives multiple USB drives and maybe this USB drive won't be sdb and maybe have more than one partition so it will be sdb1 so that's why I didn't like that so I spent a little time and looked around and there in newer versions of grub there is another option and I escape here I'm gonna go down to the second option and hit E to add that and it's almost identical except for instead of saying from ISO I say find ISO and just pass it the ISO variable that we set up here so this should work regardless of what hard drives you have in there so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna boot this option by hitting either F10 or control X I'll hit control X and it's booting from the command list and it's loading up just like any other distribution of Linux of course is running as a live CD so as far as this is concerned it's it's a live CD running off a USB drive it's a ISO file the ISO file is mounted again it loads the kernel to RAM the initial RAM disk and then the initial RAM disk will find you're at the file system in this case it's a squash file system it's squash right or squish I think it's squash a squash file system which is very common among live CDs and any second here also this is the what I get the LXDE yeah the the LXDE desktop version of it but this should be the same config for grub no matter what desktop version you download of Debian and there you go we got Debian running off the USB drive as an ISO file benefits of this as opposed to doing other way like using UnetBooten is it's not as cluttered you get an ISO file and you can put multiple ISO files in there and you have to configure the grub file properly and it's different for each distro so using the grub file for this is not going to work on Debian or Ubuntu for one example is that the Debian live puts its kernel and its RAM disk in a folder called live where Ubuntu uses a folder called Casper I believe that Linux Mint uses a folder called Casper as well so you'd be pointing to the wrong place plus they their kernels and their initial RAM disk have slightly different names but as you can see you can boot Debian off an ISO file I've given more in detailed instructions if you just search through my videos for multi-boot there's a few different videos where I do different ways of multi-booting USB drives so thanks for watching again sorry for the quality this was just I wanted to show this running on a real machine on a virtual machine just to show that it does work thanks for watching as always I hope you have a great day and please visit filmsbychrist.com that's Chris Decay check out the links in the description also put a link in the description to the grub file that I created for this USB drive so you can copy and paste it and will hopefully work in less years from now they changed the setup on that live CD thanks for watching