Installing a distro with no cd/floppy/usb drive
 

Hi - I wrote this in the DamnSmallLinux forum but I'm thinking it's a little more generic and so have copied it over to here. I will then delete the other thread:

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Hi all.

I have searched the forums and google to no avail, (difficult considering the search terms)

I have an old pc which i managed to force simplyMepis on some time ago. SM is too much for it to use really, and I was hoping to get a smaller distro on there. I've looked and am keen to experiment with DSL.

The problem is I don't have a working CD Drive in the machine, nor access to a usb pen (nor a floppy for that matter!). I have the iso on my mepis box but what can i do now to install it? (I'm expecting the answer to be nothing, but I can hope...)

If anyone knows of a method/any other distros I might try that I could install, I'd appreciate it.

Many thanks!

Mitch.

Can you network boot?
failing that you could probably scavenge, beg, borrow or steal a drive from somewhere and use it just for the install?

D.

I can network boot, yes - and I'm sure I could "scavenge, beg, borrow or steal" but where is the fun in that? :)

I have been shown by a friend of mine these two sites:

http://www.bobpeers.com/linux/hard_drive_install

http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html

Which I will try tonight.

Ideally I am looking to do this without the scavanging though :)

Thanks(!)

Mitch.

Moved from my other thread:

PTrenholme:
You might be able to use the new GRUB2 (still, I think, "alpha," and only available in source) to boot from an ISO image. Here's a link to the project description. According to the current status WiKi, it does support ufs file systems, but it's not clear to me (and I haven't looked at the code) if it only supports ufs on a physical drive or if you can point it to an ISO image file.
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Using the grub.conf as described in http://www.bobpeers.com/linux/hard_drive_install didn't work as the walkthrough lists a different grub. The files/folders are all in different places and according to 'find / | grep grub.conf' I don't have a grub.conf file. I did have a message.lst file which looked to have a similar format but when edited (from root) it didn't seem to make a difference to the bootloader. I am not sure If I am using grub - the bootloader has a mepis front end to it so perhaps it doesn't use grub at all. I'm afraid I don't know how to find out.

The second link I looked at wasn't any good for me either as it describes moving from windows to linux, where I already have linux installed.

I didn't get the opportunity to try the grub2 suggestion in the other thread yet (for the brits out there, I was preoccupied with the last in the series of shameless!) but will try that tonight.

Any other ideas?

I can netboot from a seperate windows machine but all the walkthroughs I have seen are either from linux to linux or windows to windows and I have yet to find a way to merge the two...

Ok - I've tried a network boot - I found that as I am using windows xp as a server the windows -> windows network boot walkthroughs were a bit more useful, and I have now successfully got my pxe boot to talk to my windows xp tftp server. - Hoorah!

Now, however, I am having trouble with getting a file to boot. I have the client asking me for a boot file, however no matter which file i feed it from the iso, it fails on me. Hopefully I'm now at a stage where some of you could help.

If i wanted to install feather linux or DSL over the network, which files/file structure would I have to use to get it to work? is there a special files i need that I can't get from the iso?

TIA,

Mitch.