mounting iso's

Haloony · 10-24-2005, 11:50 AM

Hey my name is Hal and I really wanted to get into linux so i found an unused pc in my house hooked it up to a monitor keyboard and mouse, but I had to find a distrubution. I was having trouble burning the isos to cds and i also found an old red hat 7.0 lying around and i decided well nothing else worked so what the hell. I remeber reading in one of many newbie linux articles that you can bypass the burning part and mount the iso containing the os right onto the system and install it from there. Is that true? If so how can i do it? Thnx

dinolinux · 10-24-2005, 12:10 PM

Redhat 7 is _very_ old. If you have a CD burner, you could make your life so much easier. Mounting iso images is a complicated process. But the basic thing will be:

Code:

mkdir /mnt/myiso
mount -t 9660 /path/to/iso/file.iso /mnt/myiso

But I would _strongly_ suggest burning a cd instead

Haloony · 10-24-2005, 12:26 PM

hehe ye i can tell it's very old, but my cd/dvd-rom went totally beserk when i uninstalled roxio easy media the drive actually disappeard from the computer and i had to mess with the registry to get it back, but since then it hasn't been the same cd burning just hasnt worked. Whatever thnx for ure help- guess i gotta use another computer

imitheos · 10-24-2005, 04:27 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by dinolinux
Redhat 7 is _very_ old. If you have a CD burner, you could make your life so much easier. Mounting iso images is a complicated process. But the basic thing will be:

Code:

mkdir /mnt/myiso mount -t 9660 /path/to/iso/file.iso /mnt/myiso

But I would _strongly_ suggest burning a cd instead

I am sorry if i am wrong but i believe the right syntax is the following:

Code:

mkdir /mnt/myiso
mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/iso/file.iso /mnt/myiso

the "-t iso9660" is not needed because the kernel can autodetect the type of the filesystem.

phil.d.g · 10-25-2005, 02:39 AM

imitheos: you are correct.

There is nothing complicated about mounting an iso image, all that is required over mounting a CD is the path to the iso image and the '-o loop' option in the mount command

If you want to install an OS from a mounted iso image then that is harder

Razze · 10-25-2005, 02:57 AM

If you can't burn an iso-image you can also do a net-install if you have a relatively fast way of connecting to internet. Of the more newbie-friendly distros I know of at least Mandrake can be installed using 2 floppy disks and getting the packages from the net. There are also fairly good instructions for the floppies, and once you get the installation running the only difference from installing from CDs is that the data is coming over the net and not from the CD.

b0nd · 10-25-2005, 03:45 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by phil.d.g
imitheos: you are correct.

There is nothing complicated about mounting an iso image, all that is required over mounting a CD is the path to the iso image and the '-o loop' option in the mount command

If you want to install an OS from a mounted iso image then that is harder

Hello,
i've never done it...
so would like to ask that its harder in wat sense ???

regards

Haloony · 10-26-2005, 07:06 PM

Hey razze lets say i wanted to do it the way youve just explained, where would i start?

Razze · 10-27-2005, 01:02 AM

I have only installed Mandriva over the net so I can not be sure about the others, but the basic idea is that you download 2 floppy images (one boot image and one with network card drivers). You copy the images to floppy disks, boot from the first and follow the instructions from there on. Once you get the installation program up and running the install process is exactly as if you were installing from a CD except that the packages are downloaded from the internet once needed - and there is no need to change CDs

On http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/downloads you will find a list of mirrors where you can find the necessary files if you choose Mandriva.

In the README.TXT found on the mirrors the installation process is described in detail.

Good luck!