Install without CDROM or Network Boot

[Ed K.]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2006, Michael Harris wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to put FC5 on a Gateway 9300 Laptop. It is about 5 years
> old and still has plenty of life left in it, except:
> 

snip

> 
> On the plus side, I do have a working Win98 installation in one
> partition and a working Redhat 9.0 release in another. I plan to scrub
> the RH9 partition & load FC5 on it, but keep the windows one.
> 
> I looked into using the 'smart boot manager' but found that it cannot
> boot from USB devices.
> 
> Is there any way to start the installation either from the Win98 side,
> or from the RH 9.0 side, reading from the USB CDROM instead?
> 

well, yes there is, I'm guessing that you have tried other options, so 
here is another one... copy these files to a directory under windows:

ftp://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/pub/linux/loadlin-1.6/update-1.6c/loadlin.exe.gz
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz

uncompress the loadlin.exe.gz file to loadlin.exe

Then exit windows, booting into dos, and run this command in the same 
directory

loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img

Its been a while, so look at 
http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/manual.txt
if there the above command gives an error

ed