ZoneO-tips for Mandriva Linux

I have a laptop with no floppy and no CD drive. How to install Mandriva from the hard disk?

 
 

Tough one actually! All the documentation I could find on linux installation assumes that you either have a floppy or a CD drive to boot from. Now how do you get this done if you have none of them! Well, I have a solution but you need to have some form of a Linux version already installed...

By the way, it's a bit tricky. Linux newbies might prefer to borrow some for of a USB DVD or floppy drive!

First, you need to get an image on the Mandriva installation DVD. If you are a member of the Mandriva club, you can simply download it. If you have the actual DVD, you will need to extract it using another computer, it can be done as follow

• Start k3b,
• Select Tools > DVD > Copy DVD
• In the copy window, select the option only create image and choose a filename

Now, you need to put your image in a partition other than /. You can see the space available on all partitions with the command df:

$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5 8140744 3391384 4335832 44% /
/dev/hda7 9093092 4104756 4988336 46% /home
/dev/hda1 10251324 10051036 200288 99% /mnt/windows
/dev/hda8 5930648 1921476 3707908 35% /usr/local

In this case /home (/dev/hda7) is large enough, so I'll use this one. Move the image to this partition

mv Mandrakelinux-10.1-Official-DVD.iso /home/dvd.iso

You want this image to be mounted, just like another partition... Create a directory to mount the image

mkdir /mnt/iso

and add the following line to your file /etc/fstab

/home/dvd.iso /mnt/iso iso9660 ro,loop,auto 0 0

Test it, it should work:

mount /mnt/iso
ls -l /mnt/iso

The next step is to copy the startup files to the main partition

cd /mnt/iso/isolinux/alt0
cp vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-all
cp all.rz /boot/

and edit your lilo configuration (/etc/lilo.conf) file to allow booting from this new kernel

image=/boot/vmlinuz-all
label=all-install
root=/dev/ram3
initrd=/boot/all.rdz
append="ramdisk_size=70000"
vga=791
read-only

and restart lilo

/sbin/lilo

You are all set actually! Here is the rest of the procedure:

• restart the computer,
• choose to boot from all-install,
• it might take some time, but you should end up with the Mandriva installation program,
• choose install from hard disk, with /dev/hda7 partition (whereever your dvd image is) and dvd.iso as image name.

That's it. You should be able to install from there...

Links

• This article on the Mandriva club
• k3b
• Mandriva club

 
 

05/2006