I want to do a fresh install of RH9 on a Shuttle XPC which I plan on using as a home server. It has no floppy drive, and I plan on putting a scsi tape backup drive in the only cd-rom bay. I have used the dat drive before, and I have found that it needs to be there, along with the scsi card, while RH installs in order for it to (easily) work. So...

Is there a way for me to install over the network w/o a cd or floppy? (Sorry if this is a dumb one) Perhaps I should install with the cover open and leave a cdrom attached to install?

Thanks in advance!

This may be the quick-and-dirty solution. Or you can export the cd from the network via bootp + nfs, but you'll need a nic card capable of net booting, plus some work to set it up.

Howzit

u need to crerat a linux bootdisk once that has been done and u have copied the cd onto another box then u will be able to install either through nfs, ftp, http.

chow

I have installed a number of distros without using a CD or floppy, and not doing any kind of net booting. What I did was to remove the harddrive and put it into another machine (or use one of those USB-->IDE adapters... they're great!). Completely erase it and put a partition just larger than the install CD and mark that partition bootable. Bear in mind that if you're doing this with RH9 you will only be able to use CD1. Then use dd to copy the ISO file into the partition. Put the drive back into the box and reboot. With any luck your computer will see that you have a bootable partition, try to load it, see that it is really a CD and boot from it anyway. At least it worked for me