Newbie: How to upgrade from Red Hat 9 to Fedora from hard disk

[Barry Yu]

I am a half newbie and i've been istalling redhat from ver. 6 upto 9 and 
fc1, but mainly  boot from  cdrom, and  i can  rawrite to make  floppy 
to  boot to install as  well , my problem now is I just had a sony 
laptop that equipped with docking station and both floppy and cdrom were 
in that docking station which I don't have. For installation of MS XP 
and other MS OS, I can take the hard drive out from this laptop, use a 
convertor to convert this tiny laptop type hard drive into a desktop 
connection and use regular IDE cable to hook up to one of my desktop 
where CD roms  are  equipped,  then  I copy  the  needed setup  elements 
(such as entire \i386) into the laptop hard drive, and then hook it up 
back to the sony laptop, start the installation from the laptop and it's 
done without problem.
Without  floppy  drive and cdrom,  to install  Red  Hat 9  or Fedora,  
what can I do ? I would  appreciate if you could tell me in a little 
specific way: I've been looking this over the google for more then 3 
weeks, most of the mentioned to use loadlin, but unfortunately the 
proceedure decribed is too difficault for me to understand but could not 
proceed at all. Seems to me, one of the  must steps is copy all the 3 
downloaded iso files  into  the hard drive within a folder, but I don't 
have a floppy in the laptop! What else do I need to copy into hard drive 
and use them to start iso install in a laptop without floppy drive and 
cdrom drive?
By the way, I tried the iso hard drive installation in my desktop 
yesturday and the result is not working ;
1. All FC1 cd1 to cd3  iso files I downloaded and md5 checked ok, and I 
burnt the into bootable cds, I used these cds intalled sucessfully in my 
desktop.
2. With same iso files, I mount the cd1 in a virtue cd rom and copy the 
rawrite, used it to make boot floppy, then in desktop I copy all 3 
downloaded iso files into a hard drive (/dev/hdb14).
3. Restarted the desktop and boot up with the floppy made by rawrite, 
choose "install from hard drive" and direct it to find the image in 
hdd14 where all 3 iso files are placed.
4. The install was proceeding about a minute and a message displayed 
something like "The partition you are going to install is beyond 1024 
cylinder and may have boot up problem, continue anyway?" and I choose 
continue, but al of suddent the machine crashed and reboot.
5. Try boot from floppy again, choose install method "install from hard 
drive" again, this time different errot message "The 3rd cd number of 
bite is not equal to 1024, you can continue by installation may fail",  
exact description may vary and I don't remember exactly, and I choose 
continue and the machine reboot again.
In desktop hard drive installation, if I have done everything correctly 
as decribed above, and  the fact is all downloaded iso files I have 
already used to burn cds and those cds I had also used for FC1 
installation - the result is working even during the installation I 
checked the cd  first (at begining of installation recommanded to check 
all cds at least once). I have to assume this is a bug, if so how do I 
report to appropriate source? I am new in this list.
Thanks.

======================================================================


tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie wrote:

>On Friday 19 December 2003 14:48, Ghod wrote:
>
>  
>
>>using HD upgrade is fine and dandy.. but "NOT" for newbies!!!! EVER!
>>    
>>
>
>This is nonsense.
>I've always installed (from RH-5 or 6) from the hard disk,
>and never had any problem.
>(I don't have a CD drive on my Sony C1VFK laptop.)
>If you boot from the bootdisk floppy
>you are asked if you want to install from CD or hard disk,
>and if you choose hard disk you are asked
>what partition and directory your ISO images are on.
>The instructions seem to me to be perfectly simple to follow
>by anybody, newbie or not.
>
>In fact my question is the opposite.
>I don't understand why people go to all the trouble of burning CDs
>to install Fedora-1 when you might as well install or upgrade from hard disk.
>I can see the point if you want to install on lots of machines,
>or maybe if you have no machine running Linux.
>But most people seem to be running RH-9,
>in which case it seems to me much simpler to upgrade from hard disk.
>
>[Incidentally, I don't have a floppy drive either on my laptop,
>but have always found it easy enough to abstract the bootdisk from the ISO,
>by -- in brief --
>
>mount -o loop /windows/Fedora/yarrow-i386-disc1.iso /mnt/cdrom
>mount -o loop /mnt/cdrom/images/bootdisk.img /mnt/floppy
>cp -a /mnt/floppy/* /boot/fedora/
>
>and adding a stanza in  /etc/grub.conf to boot from this directory.]
>
>But that's a different story.
>My main point is that it's easy and safe to install or upgrade from hard disk.
>
>
>
>Timothy Murphy  
>e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
>tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
>s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
>
>
>--
>fedora-list mailing list
>fedora-list at redhat.com
>To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>  
>
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