I'm trying to install Fedora from the CD in the book "Linux for Non-Geeks". But the CD rom drive on my computer is broken (HP laptop). So I made a boot disk so I can boot from floppy - which wroks fine. I also saved the CD on my hard drive by using second CD drive (connected by USB). So I have all the CD info stored on my C drive. When I get to the set up part of Fedora where it's wondering were the rest of the set up is I don't know what to put. It says:

What partition and directory on that partition hold the CD images for Fedora Core? Then it gives me
"/dev/hda1" and "Directory holding images:________" but I don't know what to type here.

Can I install this way? And if so what do I put in the blank. I copied the whole CD right into my C drive.

well, /dev/hda1 is fedora's equvallent of your 'c drive', so i guess you should just point out the directory_containing_images' name. By the way, do you have CDimages or separate files copied to the hdd?

There may be a boot image that will allow you to boot from your usb hard drive. If you can use the external usb CDROM, look for a README or similar file for information. I used to have an HP laptop where my internal CDROM went out, and installed Mandrake linux from a usb CDROM drive.

If you did copy the cd image to C: then /dev/hda1 is where the image is located.

By the way, an image is a copy of the entire cdrom, and usually is given an .ISO extension. It will be a large file, about 650-700 Mbytes. Don't be offended, for pointing out something you probably already know. Sometimes people will do something like simply burn a CDROM file with an ISO file in it, rather than using the image to burn a disk.

Thank you both so much for your posts. I did actually make the mistake that both of you describe. And I did get it to work a slightly different way. I used the boot disk to boot from the floppy while I had the external CD drive conneted through a USB port with the CD in it. It just worked straight away and now I have it successfully installed.

I too have an HP with a broken internal CDROM drive. It's the HP Pavilion N5470.

Anyhow, thanks again!

That is exactly how I did it. By the way, I've since upgraded.