Installing Suse 9.1 onto spare HDD (to use with another system)
 

I'm building a super-lightweight system from bits I have lying about my bedroom.

I have the Suse 9.1 professional installation discs, but I wanted to try installing it from my current system (to save me having to put a CD drive in the lightweight system). The way I was planning to do this was to:

- Plug a spare HDD into my current system
- Install Suse onto that HDD, but without the details of the system that's doing the installing (as it wouldn't be the one using the OS)
- Put the HDD into the lightweight system
- Boot from that HDD

In YAST I have found an "Install into directory" option under the "software" category. If I mount the HDD and do an install into directory onto the HDD, will that work?

Does anybody understand me? It's getting quite late... :P .

I've never attempted anything like this before. :D .

It will install and then when you move it to another computer the device (/dev) and all info and config files will be wrong and it'll say kernel panic.

In an attempt to provide a little more information... if you add the spare hard drive to your current machine, let's assume it will be put into the primary slave position (eg, /dev/hdb). When you install Linux onto that drive, there will be certain files that will capture the device name (for example, /etc/fstab, lilo.conf, and so on all store the specific, current partition locations) If you then move that "spare" hard drive into your lightweight machine, it probably would be installed as the primary master (eg, /dev/hda) and thus there will be a mismatch between the previous device locations and the current device locations. As a result, if your fstab specified that the root partition was /dev/hdb2 (because that's what it was when or originally installed Linux) but there now is no /dev/hdb2, you will run into problems.

Since you will have to open up both machines anyway, why not just temporarily install the CD drive into the lightweight machine, install Linux, then move the CD back to your main machine?

Ok thanks for the advice. As it happens I have problems with my Suse and Knoppix disks anyway, so I'm gonna have to sort that out first...