Boot From an ISO, Harddrive

I hope I can explain this.

I want to take a boot able Iso, and put it on a new hard drive.
Then boot from the hard drive with out the cd install, almost like a boot able windows cd,

How can I achieve this?

Thank you

 

Iso's have to be converted to be usable. ed

 

I understand that, for example, instead of installing windows from a cd, i want to boot into windows setup straight from the hd, i want it to do the exact same thing as if there is the boot cd

 

Curious request .... ?

But it got me thinking .... why not simply copy the content of the Windows installation CD to the hard drive .... and boot from it .... ?

No need to worry about the .iso business ...

I wonder if it would work?

 

good point.
I wonder if the boot loader would would work the same.
maybe if you use a partition to put it on like the manufactures do and just change boot order after first restart????

 

You can copy the installation CD to your hard disk and run setup.exe from there. It's called a flat install and it's much faster and more reliable than doing it from the cd - but you can't boot it. To boot an iso you need a boot manager other than the Windows one, such as Grub4DOS, which is capable of directly booting an iso.

The OP posted this question twice. I posted this in the other version -

That's how I have my system set up - so I can boot into an OS of my choice, or boot a bootable ISO, such as Acronis Rescue Media, without needing the CD.

Learn all about it here -

http://themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php

Although the article is directed at Acronis users, the method will work for any bootable ISO.