How to reinstall slackware without buring CD's
 

How may I reinstall slackware without buring CD's? I have nothing to loose (on Linux partition.) I backed everything I need up on another partition and ready to go. I am using slackware 10.1. I made a mistake when upgrading, and it seems very buggy now.

Thanks in advance!

yes.. but it's a pain. you can use the initrd from the installer cd and boot with it as your root filesystem by copying the boot loader configuration from the one on the cd, then install from nfs or some local directory.. argh.. if you're acutally interested in this method, I'll describe it in more depth.

that said... I don't know of any simpler method.

Can I mount the CD image and uninstall all packages using "removepkg" then install the packages using "installpkg". Is it safe to do that, and will it work?

I highly doubt that'll work.

on the cd there's a file called " upgrade.txt " ( dunno in what dir. ), that describes howto upgrade.
i guess you can use that with the mounted iso's .

egag

This is from the slackware web site
I have a laptop with no cdrom, so i took the harddrive out put it in a working desktop, ran cfdisk and created all of the nessercery partitions. It is only a 1GB drive so i made a 250Mb partition and put a ext2 fs on it at the end of the disk and put all of the basic packages i needed to get running. Next is to make the boot and root floppy disks. Then put the laptop back together and boot from floppy, before running setup you need to mount the partition where you put the packages on, then once in setup select that mount point as the source for the install.

Then eventually at the end you have a basic system running. However if you have a big enough harddrive you can just make a partition big enough to fit all of the cd. At the end of it I deleted all of the packages and moved my home partition to the last one.

There are other ways to get the cd's on there, like
- Use a live distro to create the partitions and copy the cd's over the network to a partition.
- If you don't have ethernet you could use a serial line and some thing like minicom to move the files, but it is very slow (i mean very slow).
- Put it all on floppy disk, if you have a few hundred lying around. And a couple of years to split it all up and write them.
- or NFS

The choice is yours


Good luck
:)