Add files to bootable Linux CD ISO image...?

it certainly ought to be possible to manually construct a working image on a hard disk. Just because an automatic installer isn't provided shouldn't necessarily be an obstacle.

There's various ways to do it. Almost certainly simply to use a full linux system to do the work - might be possible with windows, but then you have to fight using foreign filesystems, etc.

If you have an usb disk caddy thing and another linux pc, you could attach the disk to the "real" computer and just prepare the disk image from scratch (install bootloader and copy the files from cd to disk)

Another way, if the target disk is big enough, is to first install a full linux onto the disk, leaving plenty of unpartitioned space (or perhaps create an unused first partition) for the knoppix installation. That gives you a bootloader, etc. Then use that installation to copy the files from the cd onto the first partition, add a new entry to the bootloader to boot from that partition, and take it from there.

Could possibly first install linux onto the disk and then replace bits in-situ to transform it into the knoppix system. (Perhaps leave the newer kernel there, rather than using the old one that comes with the cd - the notes on the project summary do suggest updating the kernel.)

Don't know if it helps but how to customise systemrescuecd is here http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/Customization/
The procedure could perhaps be modified for your case

esuhl wrote: »

So it would be really cool if I could "install" the live CD on a USB and HDD (depending on the machine).

(on just copying the files to hard disk...)

I don't know -- CD and HDD booting seems to work differently. :-/

Sure - the actual bootstrap bit is different. But once the kernel is running, the initrd is loaded, and the root filesystem is mounted, everything else should be fine. That was why I'd suggested first getting a standard (hdd) linux bootloader onto the system - probably grub.

I tried extracting the ISO to a new drive and booting it from Linux, with the following GRUB entry:

menuentry "KnoppiXMAME" {
    set root=(hd1,1)
    linux /isolinux/KnoppiXMAME
    initrd /boot/Boot-NoEmul.img
}

But I just get a lot of errors culminating in a "kernel panic".

The only system files on the CD are:

rootsquash
boot/Boot-NoEmul.img
isolinux/boot.cat
isolinux/boot.msg
isolinux/isolinux.bin
isolinux/isolinux.cfg
isolinux/KnoppiXMAME
isolinux/miniroot.gz

Any ideas...?

I downloaded the iso and had a quick look. 'rootsquash' is the root filesystem, as a squashfs. So you'd need to expand that onto a disk partition as the root filesystem. unsquashfs is the standard linux utility to do that - maybe you can do it from windows, but I wouldn't be trying that. You might be able to just copy the squashfs image directly to a partition and just mount it directly as a squashfs -

isolinux is, I'm guessing, the bootloader - https://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=ISOLINUX - so you shouldn't need any of that when using a proper bootloader - other than the initrd and kernel, of course. Oh, and the kernel command line parameters from the cfg file.

BTW, I tried UNetBootIn, RemasterSys and PenDriveLinux, but nothing seems to work.

I assume you'd just be wanting grub for a hdd. But I can't claim to be an expert at all the various bootloaders around. (One of my systems is still using lilo.)