Install from NTFS (XP) partition?
 

Hello,

I'm returning to slackware after a few years absense and have an installation question...

Will I be able to mount the ISO from a seperate physical drive on an NTFS partition to install from? I don't have a burner, but I have already pulled the ISO down to my HD.

I saw something on RH's help page about being able to mount an ISO and install from it, but all the examples seemed to imply that you were already running Linux.

My other option would be to do a net install from an NFS share, but I'd need to figure out how to make an NFS share on an WinME box.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
-pete

Yes, it is possible install from a mounted iso image under loopback. The tricky part here will be because it is on an NTFS partiton. You could create the boot floppies to boot from and mount a root system from the 5 root disks. But then you need to mount the NTFS partition. I do not know if the boot kernel has NTFS support to enable this part. If you have disk space available though, you could create a 1 GByte FAT32 partition and copy the iso image there. The boot kernel should have support for FAT32. After the install, the partition can be deleted.

Boot the disks and login as root.

cd /
mkdir /cdimage
mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /cdimage
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /cdimage/slackware.iso /cdrom

Partition your disks and then run setup.

You could try ntfs as the partition type above instead of vfat. Also, the hda2 would be the real partition that has the iso you desire mount. And slackware.iso is the actual name of your iso image.

Hope it will be of some help.

Cool, I'll see if the boot kernel has NTFS support first. If that doesn't work, is there a freely-available re-partitioning tool (like PartitionMagic) I can use to muck with the partitions? I'm not ready to wip out my Windows drive, even though I'm so fed up with WinXP I'm ready to throw it out the window! :p

-pete