>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. Thanks.
