i attempted a Harddrive installation. I didnt know what i was doing, and ended up unarchiving the iso's
I have my harddrive partitioined, One WinXP, and one ext2, one swap
i booted using the hd.img and everything was going along smoothly
then the installation began not finding packages
I later found the poackages it didnt find were the ones not on the first
CD
I have 3 directories on my windows system
C:\MDK - 1st cd
c:\MDK2 - 2nd cd
C:\MDK3 - 3rd cd
the installation ended up completing and i had a running box, just a very limited one
i attempted to install a driver for my intel 537ep modem, and it needed autoconfig.h and advised me to install the linux source
this i attempted to do, but the RPMDrak couldnt find it
then everything stopped working, even the RPMdrak
so i ended up attempting to reinstall
but instead this time, i thought the installation may be more capable of finding the packages if they were in the same dir as the 1st cd
so i put the RPMS2 and RPMS3 (the RPM dir from cd 2 & 3 respectively) in the C:\MDK\Mandrake
folder.
the installation was again going smoothly, then crashed.
black screen type crash. It was on the Apache installation, exited abnormally.
it sajd the system can be safely rebooted now, so i did
it booted up to 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99...
did a little research, found out LILO was hosed.

Now for the question: What'd I do wrong? and is it possible to install using this method (without the actual *.ISO, but i have all the files)

Thanks a lot

--John

I don't really know what has gone wrong, scuzzman, but this is what I think:

The setup program is made to ask for the cdroms and doesn't automatically look on the harddisk for the packets.

I think it is possible to install from harddisk, but I don't really think you can do it with the standard setup program.

If I were you, I would totally wipe out the linux and swap partitions (let the Windows partition alive if you need it). Afterwards, put all the partitions together (Windows + Linux + swap).
When done, from windows, remake the partition on which you will install Linux.
Now you have two partitions: a Windows partition and an empty one to put Linux on (The swap partition should normally be created in the Linux setup itself).
The first thing you should do now is to look for a tutorial or HOWTO on the subject (installing from harddisk). When you think you know what to do, try again and hope it will work fine this time.

the standard install has a option to install from HD
and asks where the files are located
but it only gives me the option to specify one location
hence the though: What if they're all in the same dir

ok everyone:

I got the boot problem solved
basically what i did was reinstall, installing only the basics and KDE, no packages selected

Now i run into another issue
when i boot to windows, everything is hunky-dory
i try to boot to linux, it loads up all green, except of course for eth0,
goes to load into a login screen, and.... nothgin
screen goes black (yes, it's on) but nothing else happens.
no activity on cpu/hdd
tried ctrl+alt+f1 = nothing
tried another reinstall, nothing
i could access a console with a rescue disk, but it creates a RAMdrive, i think, because i couldnt find my inittab file to edit it not to start X on bootup.
any suggestions?
thanks