Doing a network install of FC4
 

G'day
I am keen on installing Fedora 4 on my rather quaint laptop ( Toshiba TE2000, its 5 years old now :s ) and have no choice but to do a network install as my laptops DVD drive is bust :( . I was wondering if anyone could guide me how to do it, i tried a tutorial ment for RH7 but it required me creating a boot disk using a file called "netboot.img" in the boot dir of my FC4 dvd however that file is not there ( saw on google that it hasnt been on RH for a while now ). Any ideas ?

I also tried the suse net installer however when i put it on a USB stick my laptop refused to boot from it.

Checked out on PXE and holey cow...........its complicated !!!

am considering installing from my friends USB hard disk. is that possible ? meaning can i place the FC4 dvd files onto a USB hard disk and boot up from that ?right now ive created a bootable usb stick that contains a bootable version of diskboot.img file using the command "dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda1" but till now i have been unsucessfull in getting the laptop to boot from the USB stick ( man, i hope it can boot up USB :scratch: )

man, am i in the wrong forum? Sorry for my impatience guys but my laptop aint going to last longer on this XP installation ( i havnt re-installed XP on it in 2 yrs :s )

You should read the FC4 installation guide. I think there are two separate issues here: (1) booting the installer and (2) getting the packages to install. You say that the optical drive is broken, so that's under the first issue. There are other ways of booting, like USB drive, Network PXE, and even floppy. Once you manage to boot the installer (which doesn't include the installation files part), you will need to tell it where to get the installation files; you can use a n Internet site or images on a hard drive, for example.

well, i have had to put aside most of those options already, sadly. My laptop does not have the capability to boot from USB and setting up a network PXE seems to be something too far of for a newbie like me ( it looked worse than star trek jagron :s ) booting from floppy was an option but sadly fedora no longer supports that. i dont think red hat has supported that since RH-8.

Hmm.......went over the material for PXE install, will give it a shot.

5 hours later and after picking up whats left of my brain can be considered equivalent of an early retirement. does anyone have a decent tutorial on using PXE on FC4 ?? ( the last one i tried was barely a few lines long and it took me over an hr to make sense of what to do !! )

I read this from one of the forums here : can something like this actually be done ? that would seriously be awsome but i would want a 2nd opinion before proceeding.

well i tried installing suse 10.0 on my friends laptop using my laptops hard disk and it went fine. Suse boots up fine too and i told it to skip the hardware configuration. I then transfered it to my laptop and GRUB boots fine. The windows partition i have on hda1 boots fine but the SUse i have on hda3 and hda5 refuse to boot. it shows all the unknows new hardware but then fails when it comes to loading the hard disks.i now have an extremely limited console and have no clue what to do next.
should i go back to my friends laptop and change some stuff cos i deffinately cant do much in this limited console. or would the problem be solved if i install Fedora ?? have no clue what to do guys, am greatfull for any help possible.