Installing Fedora from ISO Images - Question again

[Fritz Whittington]

On or about 2004-01-02 11:29, Barry Yu whipped out a trusty #2 pencil 
and scribbled:

> I am very musch interested that how you can load the Mandrake into a 
> laptop without both floppy drive and cdrom (If I understand your 
> laptop equipped devices correctly), would you care to share?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>
>
> david.hunt.linux at comcast.net wrote:
>
>>> 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?
>>>> On Thu, 1 Jan 2004 16:59:14 Mihai Maties wrote:
>>>>     
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>>   
>>
>>
>>
>> Thank you very much for all of the help. This was my first post to a 
>> Linux
>> mailing list, and the response was great. Of course, best of all, it 
>> solved
>> my problem. I'm a little confused as to how to respond to these 
>> emails. It
>> is not obvious that this will end up in the right place. But, here it 
>> goes.
>>
>> I tried the advice of Mihai (included above), since it was the 
>> closest to
>> how I was thinking it would be done. For my specific setup, there 
>> were only
>> a few deviations.
>>
>> 1.I have no floppy drive, so there was no /mnt/floppy directory. 
>> Without a
>> pre-existing directory the mount command didn't work. After simply 
>> adding
>> the empty directory, the mount command worked fine.
>>
>> 2. I currently use LILO, but making the changes to /etc/lilo.conf was 
>> easy
>> enough. I don't know if it is required, but with LILO, it is 
>> necessary to
>> type in "lilo" at the command prompt, after changing the lilo.conf 
>> file, for
>> the changes to actually take effect.
>>
>> 3. One more thing. The .ISO files have to be in the root "/" 
>> directory of
>> the partition in which they are located. When they were in a lower level
>> directory, the installer wouldn't find them.
>>
>> So, end result was exactly what I was looking for. The install from 
>> the ISO
>> files appeared to be working. Unfortunately the work isn't done. 
>> During the
>> install everything crashed. There was a big list of failures, having 
>> to do
>> with dev/hd issues (write permissions, formatting?). I didn't copy 
>> them down
>> as I should have, and can't get now because Mandrake was destroyed in 
>> the
>> process. I will be re-loading Mandrake, and following the process 
>> again. I
>> will try to get better failure information, and verify that it didn't 
>> have
>> anything to do with the install process. The ISO files were on a FAT32
>> partition (not NTFS, but also not a Linux partition), which may have had
>> something to do with it.
>>
I think the OP mentions he doesn't have a floppy or a CD *writer*, not 
that he didn't have a CD-ROM drive.  But I admit it's a little unclear. 

If he does have a CD-ROM drive, I think he would be best advised to go 
to one of the places on the Net which will mail you the 3 CDs for less 
than $5.   That's what I did, because even though I have a CD burner, I 
have a 56k dialup connection :-( and downloading them would have taken 
longer than the US mail...


-- 
Fritz Whittington
"You need only two tools. WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and
it should, use WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the tape..."

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