Linux Installing linux distro's directly from their images (using loadlin)

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Adept
No CD or floppy required ;)

You can boot into the installation cd ISO directly off your hard drive, as long as your installer is flexible enough to allow you to choose the location of the installation files :). If you have windows 9x or DOS installed (a DOS bootable floppy will do ;)), you can use a tool called loadlin for this purpose.

I will take the example of slackware here ...

Download the slackware 1st cd

Create a directory called slackware or something in your DOS partition. View the image with any CD image viewer, and open the file loadlin16c.zip in the "kernels" directory, copy the file loadlin.exe to your directory. Also copy the following to that directory -

kernels/bare.i/bzImage
isolinux/initrd.img

Note - incase you need a feature present on a kernel other than bare.i, use that instead (ex - jfs.i if you want to use the jfs filesystem)

Boot into pure DOS mode and cd to the directory you created and type the following -

loadlin bzImage root=/dev/ram rw initrd=initrd.img

Your installation should continue as normal. Mount your dos partition in linux, and then mount the ISO linux in any directory ... say /source by the following command -

mount -o loop filename-with-full-path /source

Now, begin the installation as usual by typing "setup", and then when it asks you for the source of the installation files, just enter "/source/slackware".

Everything should be normal from here :)
 
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