Booting a Linux Live tool from FreeBSD UFS2 partition

I would like to boot a Live Linux CD, without needing the CD. Take for example GParted or CloneZilla. Which I periodically boot off their Live CD. But I would like to eliminate the use of the CD/DVD media because it is slow, noisy, and error prone (scratches on the disc). I would prefer to load these tools from the harddisk of my service/repair PC, which I am dualbooting between Win7 (NTFS) and FreeBSD (UFS2) using Grub2.

I have already Googled enough to lea that booting ISO images is not working well (and I also understand why), and the way to do this is to extract the contents of the Live CDs and boot those files directly.

Here is what I managed so far:

• Copy the files from inside the ISO image to a folder on the UFS2 partition.
• Translate the Live CD's isolinux menu entries to a grub2 submenu.

When I select one of the submenu items at system startup time, the entry starts booting, but after some promising output on the screen it starts to spit out the same disappointing message multiple times.

modprobe: module unknown not found in modules.dep

I am pretty certain about where and why it fails. But I don't know the architecture and inner workings of these Live Linux builds enough to take the next step. And my websearch on this was not giving me useful results.

As an actual example, I will use the files from the GParted Live CD here. The relevant ones are:

• filesystem.packages
• filesystem.squashfs
• initrd.img
• vmlinuz

These I have placed under /boot/Gparted/live/ on my UFS2 partition ada0s2a ("hd0,msdos2,bsd1" in grub2 terms).

The grub2 entries I assembled from the syslinux entries of the Live CD are ...

menuentry "GParted Live" {
  insmod part_msdos
  insmod ufs2
  set root=(hd0,msdos2,bsd1)
  linux /boot/Gparted/live/vmlinuz boot=live config noswap ip=frommedia nosplash
  initrd /boot/GParted/live/initrd.img
}

and the "GParted Live (to RAM)" entry with all the same lines except for

  linux /boot/GParted/live/vmlinuz boot=live config noswap noprompt toram=filesystem.squashfs ip=frommedia nosplash

It seems to me that the filesystem.packages file is not mentioned in these entries. And again, I don't know how the Linux booting process is supposed to work here, but I am convinced that the issue I experience is because the loaded keel+initrd is trying to use data held within the filesystem.packages or filesystem.squashfs images and it does not find them.

To solve the problem, I should help the keel by telling it where these image files are. The QUESTION is, how do I do that? Where do I do that?

Reference to the filesystem.modules might be inside the initrd.img somewhere. And I can use gunzip and cpio to extract the contents of that image file. But I still don't know what to look for. And also, I am not convinced that a loaded linux keel+initrd.img will have access to files on my UFS2 (non Linux) filesystem.

Suggestions, explanations, and pointers are welcome!

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