Installing without a CDROM or USB drive

fedora-devel at tlarson.com fedora-devel at tlarson.com
Tue May 25 22:20:02 UTC 2004


Unfortunately, the size of Fedora's boot image is too large
to fit on a floppy. If you're like me and don't have a CD burner
handy, but also can't boot off a USB drive, you can still boot the 
install image from your hard drive. 

As trivial as the process is, it took me a while to figure out that
it was an option. I'll explain it here to save others headache of 
coming up with a way to install without having to burn any CDs.

Luckily you're already running FC1, right? And you already have
grub installed, right? Perfect. Just tell grub to boot the kernel
provided for USB drives (using the appropriate ramdisk image) and
you're done.                                                                   
                 

Here's a simple command sequence.  Note that this isn't for the
novice. If anything below doesn't look familiar, don't do it.
                                                                               
     
 cd iso_dir
 mkdir mnt1 mnt2
 mount -o loop FC2-i386-disc1.iso mnt1
 mnt -o loop mnt1/images/diskboot.img mnt2
 mkdir /boot/fc2inst
 cp mnt2/vmlinuz mnt2/initrd.img /boot/fc2inst
 umount mnt2
 umount mnt1
 rmdir mnt1 mnt2
                                                                               
     
 reboot
                                                                               
     
When GRUB comes up, hit 'c' to bring up a command prompt...
                                                                               
     
GRUB> kernel /fc2inst/vmlinuz ramdisk_size=8192
GRUB> initrd /fc2inst/initrd.img
GRUB> boot
                                                                               
     
If you did it right, it should boot and run anaconda.
You can specify additional kernel parameters if you want to,
like the location of your kickstart file.

Obviously your file paths may vary (for example, depending on
whether you use a boot partition or not), but this should give 
you an idea of the basic process. Adapt it to your own situation.





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