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?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.
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david.hunt.linux@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thursday 01 January 2004 04:15, David Hunt wrote:I
I am currently running Windows XP / Mandrake 9.1 on a Dell Inspiron 5100.
towas planning on upgrading to Mandrake 9.2 (mainly for ACPI) and decided
thegive 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
writingimages and view the files inside. But as far as I can tell, without
them.the images to a CD, it appears that I can't do anything usefull with
installIt seems like it should be possible to mount the images during the
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.
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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