HD-Install without FDD or CD-ROM Drives?

Forum: HD Install
Topic: HD-Install without FDD or CD-ROM Drives?
started by: ssalman

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 13 2006,18:58

I have an older ultra slim laptop, with no CD or FD. I was able to install Ubuntu and SuSE on it through PXE. Now I want to test DSL on it and see how fast it can go.

The porblem is that I couldn't find a how-to install directly from the iso file. I tried to mount the iso file but all I can see is a Knoppix image, and no install scripts. It looks like it is not hard to setup an PXE install as DSL already uses syslinux to boot, but I was wondering if there is a simpler way through mounting the iso?

Thanks.

Posted by doobit on Mar. 13 2006,18:59

Does the BIOS have a USB HDD option?

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 13 2006,19:11

I'm not sure , in the BIOS under boot it says "Removable Devices" and it has the "Legacy Floppy Drives" under there... I don't think it can do a USB flash drive.

Posted by doobit on Mar. 13 2006,19:15

It may well work with that. The pendrive HDD install installs syslinux which operates like a boot floppy. Can't hurt to try, if you have a spare pendrive laying around and access to a computer with a CDROM and aUSB port.

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 13 2006,19:35

The truth is my 2 USB flash drives were fried late last year, and I didn't want to spend more money on USB flash drives that will die on me in few months... Do I have other ways out of this other than USB install?

Thanks

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 14 2006,15:31

So is there a way to download the DSL iso file and mount it on my other Ubuntu partition and then kickoff the install process without booting DSL??? is it possible?

Posted by clivesay on Mar. 14 2006,16:11

Give a little more info. Do you have a seperate partition for the DSL image to reside on? What bootloader are you using?

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 14 2006,16:16

I have 4 partitions:
Ubuntu about 4 GB
SuSE about 4 GB
Common about 10 GB
Empty (for DSL) about 100 MB (can be made larger if needed)

I'm using Grub as the boot loader.

Thanks for your help.

Posted by clivesay on Mar. 14 2006,18:41

I'm not near a grub machine right now so I'll give a basic setup.

First you need to mount the iso and copy the /boot and /KNOPPIX folders to the partition you want to use. I got the impression you know how to mount it so I won't cover that part.

Now go into your grub menu.lst and add an entry like this....

title DSL
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/hda5
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz

This is basic and may get you booting. This was assuming an install on the hda5 partition. If it does, you can go into the grub folder inside the DSL filessystem and look at the menu.lst file in there to see some of the typical DSL grub entries to get a full functioning Frugal install of DSL.

Sorry I can't give more detail but my memory is fuzzy today without seeing it.

Let us know....

Chris

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 15 2006,19:30

Thanks Chris for your help. I did what you suggested and I was able to boot all the way until it reached a point it needed to find the Knoppix file, but it couldn’t find it. I looked in the isolinux configuration file, and I don’t see any path before the Knoppix file name… it looks I’m almost there but need to make isolinux find this file. Any way to do this??

Thanks.

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 16 2006,18:42

Found the problem... my knoppix directory was on a reiserfs partition, and it looks like DSL do not support reading the knoppix image file from reiserfs partition. Grub didn't have problem booting the kernel from it though.

I created an ext2 partition and it worked great, thanks for all your help. now I have DSL on my diskless laptop without the need for USB install.

Posted by octet70 on Mar. 17 2006,18:40

hy had the same problem whith an hold toshiba laptop.
my solution was to put his HD on an other computer for instal DSL from the cdrom.
before rebooting I had switched an other time the HD.

Now all is OK !!

sory for my english

Salut

Posted by jimihieu on Mar. 21 2006,17:32

Quote (ssalman @ Mar. 13 2006,13:58)

hi
yeah i have same problem too and would like to know how to "burn" iso image onto a partition then from that partition can boot DSL as liveCD does then can do all other stuffs later on.
please tell me how as im a poor man method.
thanxx

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 21 2006,21:08

Well, here is how I did it:

- created an ext2 partition, and mounted it
- downloaded the DSL iso file to the new partition
- used "mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path_to_iso/DSL_iso_file.iso /mnt/Your_Dir"
- copied the /boot and /KNOPPIX folders to the new partition root
- edited my grub menu.lst file to add:
title DSL
kernel (hd0,4)/boot/isolinux/linux24 root=/dev/hda5
initrd (hd0,4)/boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
-booted and selected "DSL" from the grub menu.

Don't forget to substitute your correct partion number instead of (hd0,4) and hda5.

post back if you have more questions... good luck.

Posted by Lars on Mar. 28 2006,13:03

Sorry. I'm a bit of a newbie. But I think this thread might be useful to me.
My problem is that I have an old Olivetti laptop with win98 installed. That is far to heavy for the laptop to handle so I would love to try out DSL.
The problem is the installation as I can only boot from floppy. However i cannot hotswap to the CD-rom drive (which goes into the same slot) - originally you would have a ceartain cable from the parallel port to the floppy which would allow you to have both connected at the same time. I do not have that cable anymore.
I can however, because of my windows installation, get into dos with a working cd-rom drive, but it seems I cannot run anything from my bootable DSL-CD.
I thought to this boot fra the harddrive would be a solution for me. My question would be, how do I mount a bootable image on my harddrive? I guess I would have to format a partition in something like ext2 beforhand. But exactly do I copy to the harddrive to either run it from dos (oh i guess I couldn't if it's ext2). And will of course have to remember a swap partition.
Oh please help. Remember I'm a newbie to linuxinstallations, I'm not really sharp.
Maybe, i could install i via some kind of network to. But that sound even more complicated. I would have to connect to my desktop via parallel or serial or something??
It's an Olivetti P100e, 100 Mhz, 16 Mb Ram, 1 Gb harddisk. What a monster machine, eh?

Posted by Lars on Mar. 28 2006,17:35

I was trying to follow < these tips > and it was working fine until it just hang itself in a blue screen hell during what might have been the installation process. I got past the penguin feature and all. I wonder why it never asked me where to install, but then again it might just install default on the drive where I placed the Knoppix folder, which would be fine.
As I said it hang though. I noticed something that might have been an error message during the penguin feature saying: can't find /ramdisk in /etc/fstab or etc/mtab
What does that mean??

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 28 2006,18:34

Lars, it sounds like you're still in the booting process, and it is not successfully booting yet!

The steps you have followed should get you to boot DSL, installation will be after you get a working DSL OS.

could you give more information about when it is stoping and what messages do you get.

Posted by Lars on Mar. 28 2006,19:32

Thanks God. There's someone here. Im getting quite far now. At the moment I can get to a point where it asks me where to install eg. hda2. I don't now what the linux term would be for my D: drive. I can see it says my image is on hda5, which in theory would be where I wan't to install as well, but it also says it's going to format to ext2 and thereby delete the installation files.

So where am I to put the installation files if not on the drive I wish to install to?
And how can I find out what is the name, in linux terms, of the drive I want to install to?
Is it something with cfdisk in that case how do I run that program?

Posted by Lars on Mar. 28 2006,20:09

Oh, and I guess if I want to be able to dual boot win98 and DSL, I have to do it the Grub way?

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 28 2006,21:04

Well, I'll try to answer your question to the best of my knowledge

Linux names the hard drives differently, hda5 is actually hd + a + 5, hd is Hard Disk (cleverly enough!), a is your first physical hard drive, if you have two physical hard drives you'll have a and b. 5 is the partition number, and it could be different based on if it is logical or actual partition... long story short, you need to put your Knoppix folder on a different drive and then reboot, and then you'll be able to install on hda5. The trick is that it needs to be on a partition with a supported file system: fat, ext2, etc. if you are using NTFS, I'm not sure if it will work, but if you are using FAT, you could just copy the Knoppix folder to the top directory on your C: drive, and then delete/rename the one on the D: drive, and then reboot. if you are able to boot using this method, you can format and install DSL on hda5 with no worries. your wi98 is probably on hda1.

And you are right, to double boot with Windows you need to install Grub or some other boot manager, there are some threads in this forum about Grub if you run into problems.

I hope that helps. Post back if you still have problems.

Posted by Lars on Mar. 28 2006,21:30

Thanks a lot ssalman. It's doing something now. I hope it's good. If not, I'll look at it again tomorrow. I had to do a clean hd install not the frugal thing, as that method couldn't recognize my hd.
Oh, oh. Now it ask me if I want to install a bootloader im afraid that'l crash my master boot record, when it's not the lilo/frugal/grub whatever thingy.
I think I'll be back tomorrow. But thanks, I'm getting one step closer in every attempt.

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 28 2006,21:41

if you have a windows rescue disk you can always fix your MBR (master boot record), but you do need to have a boot loader to dual boot.

unless you enjoy booting it though DOS...

post back if you run into trouble. and always backup your important stuff. don't say I didn't tell you so

Posted by Lars on Mar. 29 2006,22:09

Thanks ssalman. Everything worked out fine. I had some freeze problems but i worked out when I changed things in xsetup. I a linux user hurray.

Posted by ssalman on Mar. 30 2006,14:13

I'm glad everything worked out for you...