Installing slackware without a cdrom AND without a floppy
 

Ok, the pc i am on has NO cd drive, and NO floppy drive, just hard drives. The pc well exceeds the requirements(p3, 600mhz, 384mb ram), and is currently running LFS.

Is there anyway i can boot up the installer on this machine, without any form of optical media? I already mirror ftp.slackware.com, so i have the entire 10.1 tree on my hard drive, and all i need to do is boot up the basic bare.i installer so i can point it to /home/slackware/slackware-10.1/slackware/ . usually when i install slack i boot up with the bare.i floppy and then use the install.1 and install.2 floppies to install the system. But this pc has no floppy.

So i guess what i'm asking is if there is anyway i can make an entry to /etc/lilo.conf to boot up the slack 10.1 installer.

How did you get LFS on there in the first place if there are no floppy or cdrom drives? As far as using floppies, forget it anyways, since there are way too many packages to install. I would just go ahead and front the money and buy a cdrom for the pc, they are inexpensive.

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Based...t_with_loadlin

I followed that to boot knoppix on the pc, and then i installed it.

Later on i added an option to boot CentOS installer to /boot/grub/menu.lst.(it contained an initrd and a kernel image) From there i could "boot" the centos installer from the grub prompt, no external disks required at all, and i did an FTP install. From there i used CentOS as the host for LFS. I'm hoping that i can do the same with slackware that i did with CentOS

Why can't you just follow that same guide and substitute Slackware for Knoppix?

Or do you no longer have Windows/DOS installed?

What about booting to a USB flash drive?

Well assumming the Slackware installation tree is excessible by lilo on the PC, then you can just add it to the PC's lilo.conf and rerun lilo. Going by the info you provided above, this entry should work fine:
I tried it here and it works fine. If the installation tree is somewhere else that is inaccessible to lilo. Then you'd just need to copy the kernels/bare.i/bzImage & isolinux/initrd.img to the PC's boot partition so that lilo can find it, and adjust the above accordingly.

Hmm, I noticed in your 2nd post you mention grub, yet in your first post you said you wanted to edit lilo.conf to pull this off. So I'm confused as to which bootloader you have installed on the PC you're wanting to install Slackware too. Anyway, it would be similiar with grub, either one should work.

you could also mount the partition where you want to install Slack, say under /mnt,
and use " installpkg -root /mnt " to install the /a series.
( check if the scripts are executed ok, specially the symlinks in /mnt/lib )

then make an " fstab " file and copy a kernel + module tree
to the right dir.'s
( evt. also a lilo.conf but you can do that later )

then try to boot the " mini"-slack and install what you need.

egag

I read this message, then looked through the slackware website and I found this in the FAQ:


Q: How do I install from the ISO9660 image if I don't have a CD-R or CD-RW drive (or "I have no way to burn this image that I just downloaded.")?

With loopback of course! You can mount the ISO9660 image on the kernel loopback device from another filesystem.

For example, say you download the ISO9660 image under Windows. Boot the Slackware boot and root disks for your system. Assuming your Windows partition is /dev/hda1 and you downloaded the ISO9660 image to C:, issue these commands:

mkdir -p /dos
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /dos
cd /dos
mknod /dev/loop0 b 7 0
mkdir /INSTALL
mount -o loop /dos/install.iso /INSTALL


You can then tell the Slackware setup program to install from a premounted directory and pass it /INSTALL/slakware. This trick can also be used if you cannot make a valid CD with your burner.

Have fun! :)


I think this'll work just fine. The link that I got it from is here: http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq....installation#1