How to run os install without boot disk
 

I imagine this is a very dumb question and there is an easy answer.

I have literally tripped over an old T61 thinkpad in the basement of a new house. I have installed lubuntu on it (through the version which downloads itself from the web). In the future i want to upgrade the RAM, CPU and SSD, then put slackware on it.

The slackware ISOs are large, or at least larger than my largest USB. I would rather avoid burning a DVD*, is there a way i can download the ISO to the T61 while it is running lubuntu then boot from the ISO itself?



*(basically because i will probably have to buy more than one, and i will never use any again,... and this whole project is on a shoestring budget because i have virtually no reason to do any of it.)

how much space do you have on usb and hard drive?

so my biggest usb stick is only about 1gb (again...haven't used it in years, and probably haven't had cause to burn a cd/dvd in 10yrs). The plan is to replace the current HDD in the laptop with a 250GB SSD.

If it's possible to avoid booting from usb/dvd with the full install then i would put a lightweight lubuntu type os on it in order to get the full slackware install through some other means.

Heh, heh. Same situation. I was given a Dell Inspiron that was supposed to be running Windows Vista. Wouldn't boot due to the viruses it had been infected with. One new, larger disk drive and a larger compliment of RAM and it's now happily (well, most of the time :) ) running Tumbleweed.

Upgrading the RAM and the SSD shouldn't be too difficult but, while they might be out there, I've never encountered a mass-market laptop with an upgradable CPU.

Does a friend have a burner that would be willing to burn a DVD for you? Pay 'em a bit for the media and that'd be one way to solve your problem.

Since you've picked up a free laptop, I'd invest the piddling amount that an 8GB USB drive costs that'll hold the Slackware ISO. They're almost giving those away. In fact, I can't recall even seeing anything that small the last time I was at Fry's. Surely a local store has something for sale that's reasonably priced. Heck, they sell them at the corner drug store for less than a couple of lattes would set you back.

Aside: They were giving away 32GB USB drives at Micro Center a few months ago for coupons that they sent out via email. That's how inexpensive they are nowadays.

You may never need that DVD again but you'll find all sorts of uses for the USB drive after your initial Slackware install. Guaranteed.

Good luck...

are you installing 14.2 or current?
I think you can net install slackware somehow now??
If not, I can make you a live iso but you'd have to manually install it to a hard drive partition otherwise it runs live like Slax.
It's an easy procedure either way.
I think there is a way to net install slackware though

hmmm ok how about download the ISO then unetbootin but mount the ISO to the hard drive rather than USB

(i think that's what's going on in this example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/4844...cd-and-usb-how ?).

Otherwise you're right i'll just cough up the £5 for a usb stick.

On the T61 at least i think it's quite common to upgrade. It's currently got the Core 2 Duo T7100 which i'm going to upgrade to the T9500 if that works. The pain is that for some reason getting 8GB RAM in 2 x4GB still costs quite a lot, so i think i'll just up the current 2GB to 4GB. I know that precludes 64-bit OS but hey.

The usbboot.img will fit on usb and then install either from a network connection or a premounted iso file.
http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/sla...xe-installers/ I think it is included on the iso also.
or extract Bzimage out of the kernel folder and the initrd.img out of the isolinux folder from the iso, put them on a usb with a bootloader to boot them.

Brilliant, thank you - i'll give that a go

new house, you cannot drop 5 to 10 US buck for 16GB or greater USBStick? I found a 8GB for 3Bucks on a close out, that it a perfect size to use.

Just thought I'd ask. Save you a lot of fiddling around trying to get it to work.

haha no renting in a house share with many other people - hence this laptop looks like it belonged to the work of someone who stayed here from over 10yrs ago!

lucky you that you found it first, now you got a toy to play with.

You over-estimate the people i live with....it has a keyboard, a CD-ROM drive, and pre-dates instagram. I am a pariah for expressing an interest.

Update: My Unetbootin solution didn't work, the machine crashed on reboot with no error message. It seemed too easy anyway.
The usbboot.img also didn't work but that may be because of something i was doing.

The path of least resistance is probably to get a decent usb stick with sufficient capacity. But my main problem at the moment will be the Middletion BIOS flash necessary for the upgrade of hardware.

If you you can network boot your laptop, and have another computer to insert the Slackware install DVD in, you can install Slackware that way.

It's referred to in the Slackware Documentation Project as "Out of the box Slackware PXE server".

I have used this method and it works perfect.

easy2boot supposedly lets you boot an iso from a directory of iso's.

ISO is a filesystem, you can mount the iso and chroot to it if all else fails. Assuming at least one bootable linux option. Granted that / is probably in a squashfs file somewhere buried in the .iso image. So mounted a mounted thing to mounts upon mounts to chroot. I didn't say it was simple.

At my local walmart, 2x 32GB sticks are $22-ish. I think the 128GB stick I got last month was < $40. And they're pretty fast these days. And that's walmarts prices were are not the best IMO. TP is $1+ a roll. Ran into that at wally world in the 90s to, went to piggly wiggly and TP was < $0.35 a roll. Same TP brand and roll count. For normal stuff I always seem to pay about 1/3rd the walmart price at HEB.

Long ago I used a grub CD to boot USB on a laptop that couldn't boot USB. plop/btmgr is another bootmanager on a disc option. Many ways to skin a cat. Depending on your skillset you might even be able to mount the .iso from it's URL.

Once you figure out and mount the / of the .iso image, you could just rsync that to another filesystem and boot that image with only a few minor tweaks. Various VM options on "newer" hardware.