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I'm interested in writing a boot loader for USB sticks that looks for a directory of ISOs and gives you the option to boot one of them as if it were a bootable CD. This is basically so I have a menu driven program that allows me to install one of several different distributions off of a USB stick.
Where would I go to figure out how to make this work? Do I need to install some kind of BIOS hack to allow remapping of CD blocks to blocks in the filesystem? How would that work once the boot from the CD had enough marbles to start trying to access the device directly?
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BIOS. BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. The BIOS is stored in the ROM. It contains all the basic code for controlling your computer hardware (such as keyboards, mice, monitors and hard drives).
Booting is basically the process of starting the computer. When the CPU is first switched on it has nothing inside the Memory. In order to start the Computer, load the Operating System into the Main Memory and then Computer is ready to take commands from the User.
From within Windows, press and hold the Shift key and click the “Restart” option in the Start menu or on the sign-in screen. Your PC will restart into the boot options menu.
are you looking to learn how bootloading works? if so, you could check out the grub docs here: http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
otherwise, if you're trying to create a usb bootloader that can load a variety of operating systems, this tutorial looks like it covers it quite nicely: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/grub_intro/
I don't think it will dynamically build a loader of operating systems as they are available by reading the contents of a directory.
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