How to install Fedora without using CD/DVD drive or any other boot disk
In Category Linux
This method of installing Fedora doesn’t require CD/DVD drive or USB Flash disks. But it requires the system to have a working Linux installed with GRUB as boot loader. You need to store the downloaded DVD .iso file in a partition which will not be overwritten during installation process.
- Move DVD image to a separate partition
- Mount DVD image and copy Linux bootable files to /boot and Create a GRUB entry for installation.
- Reboot the system and select the new GRUB boot entry to start installation
The following is the list of usable partitions in my Linux system. There is a separate EXT3 partition /dev/sda6 which is mounted in /disk1 directory. This directory can be used to keep Fedora installation DVD . iso image. In this example, I am trying to install Fedora 10 on an existing Fedora 9 partition. It is done in three steps.
[root@techpulp ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda3 16G 12G 4G 67% / /dev/sda1 80M 16M 64M 20% /boot /dev/sda5 8G 1.2G 6.8G 15% /home /dev/sda6 20G 10G 10G 50% /disk1 [root@techpulp ~]#
Now move the downloaded DVD image to /disk1 partition. Then mount the DVD .iso image using loop back device.
[root@techpulp ~]# mv Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /disk1 [root@techpulp ~]# mount /disk1/Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /mnt -o ro,loop [root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/initrd.img.fc10 [root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz.fc10
The Fedora 10 installer requires install.img to be present in images/ directory relative to the DVD iso image.
[root@techpulp ~]# mkdir /disk1/images [root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/images/install.img /disk1/images/
Now add an entry GRUB configuration file (/boot/grub/grub.conf) for the Fedora 10 installation.
title Fedora 10 Installer
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz.fc10
initrd /initrd.img.fc10
Now you are all set for installation so just reboot the system. At the GRUB prompt, select “Fedora 10 Installer” which will take you to Fedora 10 installation. During the installation, select “Install from hard disk” option and /dev/sda6 as installation source because that’s where DVD .iso image is present in this example.
Wonderful article. I been looking for one on a similar note. I guess you always have something up your sleeve.
I kept following the guide and failing until i read from
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f10/en_US/sn-installing-from-harddrive.html that
“The partition on the hard drive holding the ISO files must be formatted with the ext2, ext3 or vfat file system”.
I had been using a reiserf formated partition to hold the images !