-5

If all I have is Windows 7/8/10 installed on my laptop and the Linux .iso is on the root of the C:\ drive, how can I reboot my laptop and simply pick the Linux .iso? I have seen and tried EasyBCDEdit and Wubi and others, but I don't want to install Linux. I just want to run my live .iso for testing sometimes. It's easy to do with the USB stick and DVD drive, but I can't seem to get it to work the hard drive way. Thank you for any help!!

Alex
  • 1
  • Maybe a virtual machine will work for you. You can find a guide here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/142549/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-virtualbox – Wayne_Yux Sep 28 '15 at 16:18
  • The reason why it is easy to do on the usb and dvd drive is because, you are putting the iso on those disks and making the disk bootable. This process of making bootable is specific for each OS, since your C:\ drive is already made bootable with windows, your computer will boot into windows on startup. You can put the iso into another partition and make it bootable with linux, but the windows boot manager still will not recognise it. To have it recognised, you should install another boot manager.(Grub or burg). The easier way is to boot with a usb or dvd. – sarat.kant Sep 28 '15 at 16:34
  • The scary thing is, I need a solution for a couple hundred people out in the field working for us. Obviously they all have their own hardware (BYOD) so the tricky part is going to be scripting a Windows batch file that I can give them to double click that will partition a 5+ gig chunk of their C:\ and automatically rename it to X:\ and then they will need to copy and paste the linux .iso into the X:\ drive and reboot. – Alex Sep 28 '15 at 18:01
  • 1
    Whatever you do Don't use WUBI! – Mateo Sep 30 '15 at 02:12
  • You should be able to just add an entry to the windows boot loader, telling it to boot from the iso but that would be off topic here. Try asking on [su] instead. – terdon Sep 30 '15 at 17:05

1 Answers1

2

The easy answer is: buy 500 USB sticks at 5$ a pop, install Lubuntu onto them without any proprietary drivers and send these to your field users through snail mail and tell them to read their BIOS/UEFI manual on how to boot from USB.

Any other solution would be consultancy, not a question on AU...

Your real question is "How to deploy Ubuntu over the Internet onto 500 Windows machines?" and that question is too broad to answer here as it just depends on the infrastructure you've got, what kind of devices, ...

The other way of doing this would be to boot the .iso from the Windows boot manager, but that would be off-topic here!

Sorry!

Fabby
  • 34,259