boot off of image??

If I understand corectly then the answer is no. If all you have is an image of the install DVD on your iPod then you can not boot off it since the image would have to be mounted to be read. So even if you mounted the image on your desktop and launched the installer, when the machine restarted the image would be unmounted and your machine would not be able to find it to boot from. The only way would be to burn either a new DVD from the image, or possibly burn to several CD's. I'm not sure if this can be done, and I'm not at my Mac to look and see.

 

Install Mac OS X on to the iPod and you can boot from that.

However be warned that its not recommended since it will spin the iPod's HDD constantly and the iPod was not designed for this think of task. It can be done, don't get me wrong however be prepared to shorten the life of your iPod.

 

also, if you install OSX on your ipod, its going to be pretty slow.

 

It is actually pretty acceptable until you start using the swap file .. but not recommended anyway ..