Installing Fedora from ISO Images

[Mihai Maties]

On Thursday 01 January 2004 04:15, David Hunt wrote:
> I am currently running Windows XP / Mandrake 9.1 on a Dell Inspiron 5100. I
> was planning on upgrading to Mandrake 9.2 (mainly for ACPI) and decided to
> give Fedora a try. Well that's the preample. But, here is the catch. I
> didn't pay for the external floppy drive, or a CD writer. So, I've
> downloaded the ISO images, I have verified the MD5SUM, I can even mount the
> images and view the files inside. But as far as I can tell, without writing
> the images to a CD, it appears that I can't do anything usefull with them.
> It seems like it should be possible to mount the images during the install
> process, instead of the CD-ROM. Has anyone ever tried that?

Boot up Mandrake 9.1 and then issue the commands:

mount /first/fedora/iso/image.iso /mnt/cdrom -o loop
mount /mnt/cdrom/images/bootdisk.img /mnt/floppy -o loop
mkdir /boot/fedora
cp /mnt/floppy/vmlinuz /boot/fedora
cp /mnt/floppy/initrd.img /boot/fedora

now add the following lines to your grub.conf file:

title - Install Fedora Core 1 -
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/fedora/vmlinuz
initrd /boot/fedora/initrd.img

Pay attention to the "root (hd0,1)" part and change it to match the "root..." 
part from the Mandrake installation.

That's it, now reboot your computer and select "Install Fedora Core 1" from 
Grub's menu. After a few dialogs you will be asked to enter the path to the 
Fedora Core iso images so make sure you'll remember it. Also note that the 
iso images cannot be loaded from a NTFS partition ( if you have the images on 
a Windows partition move them to one of Mandrake's partitions).


Mihai