DSL Tips and Tricks :: Installing DSL with HD Only

I installed DSL on an original Micron Millennia Transport (40MB RAM) with a broken CD drive and the dreaded 6729 PC card adapter that is not supported by the typical kernel drivers or boot floppies. Altho the floppy drive works, I didn't feel like making 35 floppies to load the DSL iso onto the HD.

Here's how I did it:

1. I took out my laptop HD. A friend loaned me a 2.5in to 3.5 IDE drive adapter ($5-10 online) which I used to connect my laptop HD to my desktop.

2. I used Tomsrtbt to boot the desktop and partition the laptop drive into a boot partition, a 200MB partition, and the remainder in a third partition.

3. I had the DSL iso (and the pcmcia-cs package, gcc-with-libs.dsl, and gnu-utils.dsl) on a CD which I mounted under Tomsrtbt and copied the files to the 200MB partition of the laptop HD. I extracted the ISO files on the partition.

4. I reinstalled the HD into my laptop.

5. On my desktop, I made a GRUB boot floppy from Windows.

6. I used the Grub boot floppy to boot directly into the 100MB partition with the lowram parameters from the boot\isolinux\isolinux.cfg file. (There are many tutorials on how to command line Grub boot.) So you would say something like:

grub> root(hd0,1)

grub> kernel /linux24 root=/dev/hda2 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=normal noscsi noideraid nosound nousb nofirewire noicons minimal nomce noapic noapm lowram quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

grub> initrd /minirt24.gz

grub> boot

7. From there, DSL starts and you can then install to the third partition and install LILO to the boot partition.

Once I did this, I then installed the driver for the 6927 PCMCIA as described in the Solo 2200 post in the DSL Laptops forum.

original here.