Hi,

Is there any way I can copy ( for exmaple my Suse9.0 CD) to my new (unformatted) harddisk in my laptop and then install itself to the harddisk?

I ask because I am having trouble booting from my PCMCIA/USB extrernal CDROM...

So I am thinking, maybe I can boot DOS and then format (+fdisk) in ext2 format and then copy the CD to the HD ( assuming I can access the CD after booting DOS)....

Anyone thinks this will work...? if you know how to please letme know...I am desprerate now.....

thanks,
redrobin....

you have few options here.

you can either copy the ISO image to the HD or the CD context to a directory on your HD , create Suse floppy bootdisk , boot from it and somehere in suse setup u'll be able to specify the source of the SUSE installation.

other way to do it would be a free FTP install straight from SUSE's server. Just download floppy/bootdisk and the module u want and get the ftp information and you're ready to go.

you can find more info here
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current/README.FTP

Unfortunately, DOS won't work for this. FDISK under DOS doesn't support EXT2.

The first thing you have to do is get that CD mounted. If your laptop doesn't have an internal CD rom drive, this could be tricky. There is a program called Disk Clone that you might be able to use to copy the CD's raw image to the hard disk, but that is probably not really what you want to do.

I dont' have any personal experience mounting USB drives under linux, much less under a less-than-full distribution of linux. All you are going to have to work with is the boot prompt and maybe some basic tools. I would recommend getting a microdistribution, something like Parted, that would provide just enough of a bootstap to mount that drive and start the install process.

yeah, i'd try the ftp install if you can, especially if you have access to a broadband connection

I hope trying to boot the image from a floppy and then typing in the comand line the option as "askmethod" will force the loader to ask the area where the files are located, but be sure to remove the linux CD if you use them to boot. otherwise the installation will start from them alone. if the cd's aren't present then linux will ask for the hard drive partition. select the partition that contains the image and there you go.
if you want to copy the linux iso to hard drive you may use "win iso" or similar tool.
I have tried this in redhat linux 9 (Shrike), but i dont know how this works with suse...