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I would like to boot the Ubuntu system from the installation DVD, and then make the system, after it started, run no longer from the DVD. It should continue to run using a hard disk or a ram drive, and no longer require access to the boot medium, or the DVD drive.

The purpose is to allow the use of the DVD drive for other tasks in preparation for the Ubuntu installation.

The idea sounds somewhat far-fetched, but I am fairly optimistic that it is possible.

Is there a standard way to do it?
Or are there reasons why it could be impossible?

Possible approaches are:

  • Copying the DVD to a ram drive, and somehow change the directories in / to symbolic links.

  • Find a way to overlay multiple file systems, in a way that the DVD file system continues to exist, but is never accessed again, followed by somehow making the DVD drive no longer depend on the file system.

  • Just remount the root file system somehow?

  • some kind of 'bind' mount?

Volker Siegel
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1 Answers1

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The standard way to run two or more operating systems at the same time is in a virtual machine application. The operating system that runs on the physical machine's bare metal hardware is the host OS. A guest OS is an operating system that runs inside the virtual machine application.

What you're thinking about in your question is that different virtual machine applications have different feature sets that target different scenarios for creating guest OSs.

I don't think you're going to be happy with this explanation unless I illustrate the reverse case where for security reasons applications can run natively inside virtual machines that are elevated to the status of core components of the operating system as is done in Qubes OS. Virtualization is performed by Xen, and user environments can be based on Fedora, Debian, Whonix, and Microsoft Windows, among other operating systems.

karel
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