[clue] [tech] Ubuntu: how to make a bootable boot CD for my system?

[Jim Ockers]

Hi CLUEbies,

I'm moving a Ubuntu 8.10 system from one VM hypervisor to another.  
Since the VM disk formats are incompatible I have to recreate the 
filesystem on the new VM and I thought I would just copy the filesystem 
over the network.  The only thing that won't be copied over is the 
ability of the new VM to boot from the hard disk.

Red Hat/CentOS makes this easy because there's the mkbootdisk utility 
with --iso command line.  Using that, I can make a bootable CD that will 
boot my system without anything set up on the hard disk.  Once booted 
from the ISO, I can re-run grub and am good to go.  The only issue is 
getting the new VM booted in the first place.

The Ubuntu 'mkboot' utility is stupid and busted.  One of its bugs is 
from the man page for mkboot(8) is "mkboot only works on floppy diskette 
drives."  Since this is a VM there is no floppy disk drive, real or 
virtual, on the server or hypervisor.  Frankly I'm really un-impressed 
with Ubuntu, but then again I'm from the Red Hat/CentOS school of 
general awesomeness, so maybe I'm missing something. :)  Feel free to 
flame away but the only thing that will really impress me is if there is 
some Ubuntu-ish easy way of doing the same thing (such as moving/cloning 
systems) that Red Hat has let me do for years.

Is there some other EASY way to make this Ubuntu system boot exactly its 
kernel, with its own initrd, from a CD-ROM (ISO image, really)?  This is 
a headless server with no GUI.  I also don't want to a make bootable USB 
flash drive which is what most of my googling indicates that most Ubuntu 
users are trying to do.  I'm also not going to reinstall Ubuntu and 
reconfigure all of the services and custom stuff that's installed in 
this VM.

You might think I should have to go try to dig up a USB floppy disk 
drive and assign it to the VM to try to get this to work.  For one 
thing, that level of old-schoolness is not really my style, but for 
another thing this VM hypervisor has "issues" with assigning USB devices 
to VMs, and so it wouldn't work anyway.  (Which is a big part of why I'm 
moving the whole thing to a different VM hypervisor.)

Thanks,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.E., P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: http://www.ockers.net/msi.html


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