Installing GRUB manually, is this going to be a challenge?
 

I would like to do a CD-less installation of a Linux distro on a new laptop with a pristine hard disk.

I reason that once GRUB is installed I can figure out how to point it to the installation disk image (on its own partition, of course).

But I'm a bit confused about how to get GRUB installed correctly manually, and in particular how the Master Boot Record is changed to point to GRUB.

Does anyone know of a good resource for explaining this step-by-step? I am using Knoppix to get access to the disk.

Thanks.

Well i don't know if you want to use gentoo, but the gentoo CD can do this and the handbook is very good at telling you how to setup grub etc.

I'm also a bit confused as to why you don't wish to use CD, seen as your using knoppix?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...p=10#doc_chap2
^ gentoo grub section of the install handbook.

Here's the documentation for installing debian from hard disk. Maybe it will scale to your distro of choice.

Thanks for the links guys. I used them.

Debian and Gentoo are perhaps a bit difficult for me. I wanted to try Ubuntu but I got an error during the installation ("Permission denied" when trying to run ./debootstrap). So perhaps I'll stick with Suse, which I know a bit.

Anyway, grub-install worked smoothly and installed GRUB to the MBR without problems. What a surprise.

The reason I want to avoid CDs is pure ideology. Seems to me that physical media (disks) are not the future. The network is the future. Might as well learn how to do it diskless now, because disks won't exist in a few years. And also, I object to wasting 50 cents on a blank disk.