Diskless install of Fedora tip

Mike C posted this in fedora list 2008-05-13

There is a good way to do it without burning any disks at all...

Download the DVD iso to your machine and place it somewhere NOT in the
partition that you want to install into. i.e. have a partition such as
/opt and put it in there and not in the / partition.

then as root:
1) make a mount point, eg /mnt/tmp
2) mount -o loop path/to/DVD/iso /mnt/tmp
3) cd /boot
4) cp -a /mnt/tmp/isolinux/vmlinuz install.F9
5) cp -a /mnt/tmp/isolinux/initrd.img install.F9.img
6) cd /boot/grub
7) add a section to grub.conf like the following:
title Fedora 9 Install
root (hd0,5) <-- change as needed by your partition arrangement kernel /boot/install.F9 initrd /boot/install.F9.img 8) umount /mnt/tmp At this point you have all the ingredients to run the install from files already in your machine without the need to point at a physical DVD or CD. 8) Now reboot and select the Fedora 9 Install line instead of your normal kernel... and when the install begins select a hard disk install and choose the appropriate path to where you stored the iso on the non-root partition - and install to the root partition - so long as you do not format the partition where the iso is stored this will work fine. I do it for every install and have done to since early in the Fedora series. (You might want to burn the netinst.iso as a rescue disc in case things go awry though)

About pauljohn

Paul E. Johnson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas. He is an avid Linux User, an adequate system administrator and C programmer, and humility is one of his greatest strengths.
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