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Topic: switch from HD to frugal within DSL?

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sfabius

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Feb. 14 2007,14:26

I have recently done a full HD install on my old Toshiba Portege 3025, which boots only from the hard drive. I installed by putting the hardrive in another laptop that can boot from CD. It works great on this old machine, I am impressed.
Now that I've read a little more about frugal install, it might be right for this machine; I want to use it as a glorified PDA.
So I'm wondering if there is a way to boot into the system as it is now, and then do a frugal install from there. I can use a usb drive (I have a 1Gb one) for data, but can't boot from there.
Of course, I could open the machine up again and do the same trick, but I'd rather not; the Toshiba HD is under my right hand and requires unhooking a wire that goes over it.

u2musicmike Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 149
Joined: April 2006

Posted: Feb. 14 2007,15:26

I haven't tried that but I think you can. First you will want to make a new partition on your harddrive for the frugal install but not erase your existing harddrive install. Maybe if you made a swap file you can convert part of it for frugal using cfdisk. If you use gurb install just check that it looks for Knoppix on your new partition. You might could do dual boot by modifing the grub menu.

I almost forgot something real important. You probably need the .iso file to do this and you would mount it and copy to the new partition. The regular frugal script might not work without a CD.

sfabius

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Feb. 15 2007,00:07

OK, here's the plan. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know please!

1. Boot to current HD install, create a new partition out of existing swap partition (HOW BIG? The swap is 125Mb). Can I do this when hda is mounted? cfdisk gives me an error...
I'll refer to the new partition, where I will put DSL frugal install, as hda1, and the new swap as hda2, and hda3 as the large (10Gb) partition where I now have DSL installed.
2 Create ext2 filesystem on hda1 and mount.
3. Copy dsl .iso to hda3. mount using

Code Sample

mount -o loop -t iso9660 dsl.iso /mnt/cdrom

(the following is based on this wiki page)
4. Install GRUB on hda1
5. Copy contents of /mnt/cdrom to /mnt/hda1
6. change /boot/grub/menu.lst to boot off of hda1
7. reboot
I'm kind of worried about that first part. Is there a way I can use a USB stick such that I can unmount hda?