I have laptop (acer 1410, celeron) no USB booting, no floppy and the cd drive died.

I read something about making a partition and boot from there, and install. But I couldnt find a decent page, as a matter of fact I didnt under what name should I search it on google.

I am planning to install something lightweight like, lubuntu (open to recomendations if anyone has)

Also... I have a BIOS option to boot from network... any way I can use that to install from network?

Do you have an idea?? I am open to check it!
Thanks!

Hi,

You could do something like this, assuming you can still boot (guessing windows):

1. Install grub4dos
2. Have it boot an iso image
3. Once the iso is booted, you can install Ubuntu/whatever

Take a look at this site: here

You would only get one chance to get it right, so you can test it by using qemu or something to test it before you reboot.


good luck,
rabbit2345

1 members found this post helpful.

Rabbit2345, Thanks a lot.

I also investigating in PX3 booting. I need to further check.

These might help
http://www.instantfundas.com/2007/08...ctly-from.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...k_Installation

These do help, needless to say... this metod is one shot right? I better get everything done the first time ....

You could install grub or grub4dos and boot to an iso.

The old knoppix way was basically copy the files to correct place chroot and fix all the permissions.

I am going for the install of this distro:http://crunchbanglinux.org/ Using this method:http://www.instantfundas.com/2007/08...ctly-from.html

Its a debian variant, and lightweight (I am using an Acer Aspire 1410 laptop, 10 years old... celeron procesor)

Let ya know how it went.

Thanks.

I didn't notice this. " I have a BIOS option to boot from network... any way I can use that to install from network?"

Yep, it could have been done too.

There are quite a few ways to try this. Go with that guide. It looks like it should work.

Network boot from bios, needs some kind of ROM???.... I didnt get right away on how to do this.

The grub boot to some install looked ok to try.

I didn't say how to do a network boot. I doubt your system is old enough to use a rom. A nic rom is a much different deal than normal pxe boot choice. A long time ago you had to burn a rom and actually install it on the nic. Today some nics could be flashed with a new rom image maybe. Gpxe/ipxe could maybe supply an image.

If your computer boots to pxe, then it is pretty simple to boot a network installer type image. When I say simple, that is a lie, the first time you try it will be heck.

If you want to test this, you might get two computers connected by a patch or better still a crossover cable or just through a switch/hub. Boot to a Slax cd on the master one and you will see how to start a pxe server. Then boot your text box up to network boot and it should hopefully boot up to slax.

Slax set up all the tools needed but you can also create those tools and files on almost any linux or windows computer.

I manage to download everthing and set up grub: (taking this as a guide: http://www.instantfundas.com/2007/08...ctly-from.html)

I got an error booting from grub:

A file is missing or broken: <windows root>\System32\hal.dll

And the file is actually there.

Google "bootinfoscript", go to the site, read the directions and download and run it. You should get a results.txt file as output which might help you. If you don't understand it, post it here.

Great news I got the boot to work, I can boot the iso (I did it using Unetbootin)... but (theres always a but)
When the installer tries to proceed, it keeps looking for the data on a CD.. (which there inst) and I never get an option to get the packages from an iso.
The live sessions works fine, but the text and graphical installer keeps asking for a cd.

Any ideas?

The cd in this case ought to be the mounted iso image. Not sure why the live system is asking that.

I don't get the unetbootin deal. That is for a usb flash drive.

Did you let unetbootin put the iso on the flash drive?