it sounds like his Whole Disc Image includes the partition table. That would cause any system that mounts the drive to ignore the unused space because it is not mapped, but should not cause any actual problems.
Correct!
The .iso will include an ISO <whateverthestandardnumberis> partition map, just as any other optical disc. If the PA-RISC system can boot from a CD it shouldn't have any trouble reading it.
That's the idea.
In the other thread Snial was talking about appending two other disks, so the data that would be ignored in that scenario would be two other disks, including their partition tables and data partitions. Unless the image he is writing has already been modified to have a valid partition table for all three partitions, or he is only writing the image from a single CD.
The whole installation is on 3 CDs. So, the first .iso would contain the normal .iso partition table and the PA-RISC system should boot from it and
won't see the other CDs, but that's fine.
For the Debian installation, I understand that the first .iso is the core installation and the other(s) are additional packages. So, I think it should be possible to mount those on reboot based on the sector offset and then install the packages.
So, I was thinking this would be reasonable, because I did something similar when playing with a MAME-based SparcStation 1 emulator on my Mac mini 2012. I couldn't get the FD to work, but I could create a HD image with a missing partition; then mount that missing partition from within SunOS and
dd to it. Then I could
shutdown and from the host side,
dd the data back out. It was very crude, but worked. In the future I plan to use the emulated ethernet to transfer data, now that I have a better grasp of how to link it up to virtual network interfaces on the Mac.
But thinking about it again, I might be wrong, or at least a bit wrong. I would need to mount the other
.iso images as .iso's so that the target (the PA-RISC system) understands their partition maps too. Maybe that's reasonable: the other
.iso s on the HD won't be on partitions on the HD, so it's not like it's partitions within partitions.
It does mean that DumbDD needs to be able to specify the target offset, which I hadn't considered earlier... though I could get around that too just by joining them all together. However, I might not do that as I might not want to write 2GB in one go, just 644MB at a time.