Boot Fedora 16 Live from partition on hard drive

Also known as a 'poor man's install', I wanted to have a rescue partition on the hard drive, which I can use grub to boot should something go wrong with the regular Fedora install.

Here's how I did it, based on instructions from http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=191888

Use fdisk to create a FAT32 partition large enough to hold the live distro, in my case /dev/sda8 below
Format it using mkfs or gparted.


Command (m for help): p


Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xaa9baa9b


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            2048    24578047    12288000   27  Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda2   *    24578048    24782847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3        24782848   502260399   238738776    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4       502261760   625142447    61440344    5  Extended
/dev/sda5       502263808   503287807      512000   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       503289856   605689855    51200000   83  Linux
/dev/sda7       605691904   613883903     4096000   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8       613885952   625141759     5627904    b  W95 FAT32

Mount the iso image, and copy files from it 

su

cd /mnt/

mkdir iso live

mount -o loop -t iso9660 ~/Downloads/Fedora-Live.iso iso

mount -t ext3 /dev/sda8 live

cp -r iso/* live/

Alternatively, a better way might be -
livecd-iso-to-disk --noverify --overlay-size-mb 2047 Fedora-16-x86_64-Live-LXDE.iso /dev/sda8 

Examine the grub conf on the live distro -

cat /mnt/live/EFI/boot/grub.conf

..

title Fedora-16-x86_64-Live-LXDE.iso

  kernel /EFI/boot/vmlinuz0 root=live:LABEL=Fedora-16-x86_64-Live-LXDE.iso rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet  rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 

  initrd /EFI/boot/initrd0.img

..

Find the UUID of your live partition -

[steve@aspireone753 ~]$ ls -lF /dev/disk/by-uuid

total 0

lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 10 Nov 13 11:33 B381-1423 ->; ../../sda8

Then edit the regular grub.conf on your main linux installation. Changes needed are shown in bold.

sudo vi /boot/grub/grub.conf

paste in a new entry, copied from the live distro -

title Fedora-16-x86_64-Live-LXDE.iso

        root (hd0,7)

        kernel /EFI/boot/vmlinuz0 root=UUID=B381-1423 rootfstype=auto rw liveimg quiet  rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0

        initrd /EFI/boot/initrd0.img

Reboot, and choose the live distro at the grub menu.