ISO without a CD

[TheQuirk]

Does anyone know how I could install a distro of linux without actually burning the ISOs it comes with? As in, making a partion for the ISO and booting into it, and then installing onto a different partion?

[TheQuirk]

would placing the contents of the ISO into a seperate partion and then booting into the partion through lilo work?

[creedon]

I've never heard of that exact procedure, but LFS (Linux From Scratch) is built on a formatted partition from another partition, until it's complete enough to boot up on it's own.

[voidmain]

Well if the system you are trying to install on already has Linux it would be easy, but I assume it doesn't.  And it might also depend on what distribution your ISOs are, I can think of a few ways to do it with RedHat. If the system you already have installed is Linux and you wanted to do a fresh install using the ISOs you would just mount the ISOs (using the "-o loop" option), copy the /RedHat/RPMS/* to the "/RedHat/RPMS" directory on a scratch partition, boot from floppy install disk and do an "installation from hard disk".

But since you probably only have Windows as the installed OS I would download a boot/root floppy (or Tom's boot disk) and mount the partition containing the ISO(s), mount the ISOs (using the "-o loop" mount options), copy the contents from /RedHat/RPMS/* on each CD into a "/RedHat/RPMS" directory on a scratch partion. Boot from the install floppy and do an "install from hard disk".

Or if you have another machine you can put the "/RedHat/RPMS" directory under an ftproot or webroot on another machine (could even be windows) and do an ftp or http install.  In fact you can install right off of the net with only an install floppy using RedHat.  Other distros such as Debian can install over the net but you really need a high speed connection.

And of course it would be easiest if you could just burn them to CD.

[ August 04, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[TheQuirk]

well, I already have red hat installed as my main distro, I just want to try and install some small distros that don't offer a boot disk (sorcerrer linux, actually. It compiles everything from source). Oh well, I could always waste some times and burn the ISOs!

[Doogee]

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