FC installation

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2005-03-25 at 18:06 +0500, azeem ahmad wrote:
> in fact i want to setup a hard disk say hdc which i just put into a computer 
> and boot the computer from that  hard disk and start the linux installation, 
> the newly installed system will reside on the hard disk say hda of that 
> computer. very same way like i put the first installation cd in any 
> computer, boot that computer from this cd and start the installation, and 
> the newly installed system then resides on the hard disk of that omputer.
> mean i dont want a full linux system installed on that hdc instead i want 
> that hdc to be bootable like FC3 first installation cd and then to start 
> installation from that hdc.

Please don't top-post on this mailing list.

Setting up your hard disk to do this is quite easy. Just create a ext2
or ext3 partition large enough to hold the ISO images and copy the ISO
images to that partition.

You also need to extract the installer kernel and initrd from the first
CD (or its image) so that you can boot into the installer. If you look
in the "isolinux" directory of the first CD (or
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/isolinux/) you'll see a "vmlinuz" and "initrd.img". Copy those to the same partition.

You can then use "extlinux" (see:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/extlinux.php) to make that partition bootable,
using a configuration file like the one at
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/isolinux/isolinux.cfg.

The tricky thing will be to make the target computer boot from the
additional hard drive rather than its usual hard disk. You may need to
alter BIOS parameters, or change the "bootable" flags on the existing
disk partitions to do this. You might also want to make a boot floppy
using "smart boot manager" (http://btmgr.webframe.org/) as an additional
option.

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>