Can't boot Debian ISO off Zalman VE200 drive

[Red Squirrel]

I have a Zalman VE200 drive which is suppose to emulate a cdrom drive from ISOs that you load on it. It saves from having to burn a CD or even having a CDROM drive. For whatever reason, it REFUSES to boot off the Debian ISO specifically. (found here: http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.5.0/amd64/iso-dvd/ ) Any other ISO works. I can boot off the Debian ISO from Virtualbox, so I know the ISO works.

Why wont this work?

Failing that, is there any other method I can boot from an ISO on a physical machine without burning it? Not all distros/OSes have a USB stick option, so I don't like to depend on that, I want a solution that is universal.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Have you tried the Debian Live distro instead of the full DVD's? if the live distro works, then you can just run updates after that.

 

[Red Squirrel]

The CDs work, I just like using the DVDs as there's less chance of having to "insert" more mid install, but I ended up just using the CD and it only needed disc 1 anyway. I'm just dumbfounded that this 1 ISO for whatever reason does not want to work, and it may happen to other ones in the future. I like having the install media local that way many years down the line if for some reason I need to install that version, I can.

 

[snickersnack]

Debian ISO have had a neat feature for the past couple of years. You can simply 'cat' them to a USB flash drive and boot from that. I could see whatever magic they use to achieve that possibly confusing an optical disc emulator.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Debian ISO have had a neat feature for the past couple of years. You can simply 'cat' them to a USB flash drive and boot from that. I could see whatever magic they use to achieve that possibly confusing an optical disc emulator.

That's good to know. I always wondered why that does not work for all ISOs, why does the system care if it's USB or a cdrom disc?