I decided to get Ye' Olde Laptop out from under my bed and almost made myself sick when I say the windows XP logo at boot up.

I want to get Slackware on there and stat, but I refuse to shell out the cash to buy an external CD drive. No as the topic says, I have no cdrom or floppy so I've been turning over in my head, how to go about doing this. I had a couple ideas but was wondering if anyone could share some of their own or expand on mine (I don't have all the details worked out).

Method: Use cygwin to mount a Slackware iso and chroot myself into the setup.
Problem: I would need to clear my schedule for the next week so I can figure out how to do this.

Method: Use partition magic to shrink my ntfs and add fat32. I could then install ZipSlack, boot to it, turn my ntfs into <Linux partition of choice>, download the Slackware packages from a mirror, and install them to my Linux partition.
Problem: Windows is pretty picky with it's partitions, if I can't boot after the repartition or lose my windows data, I'm boned

Method: Find a boot-loader I can install in windows that will boot to an iso on my hard drive.
Problem: Is there such a thing?


I'm leaning towrds the last idea, but I am proud to say that I am not a windows expert, and am not sure how to go about setting this up. This might be the wrong place to ask, but does anyone know of a generic boot loader that will boot from iso images stored on an ntfs drive?

Thanks!
...aaron

Look in the slackware cd1 /rootdisks/readme.txt

I have no idea how you can transfer anything, unless you can make a bootable usbkey ( http://www.geocities.com/cwwilson721 ), and use that....

(I forgot about that page I made a long time ago...)

Grub for NT? Or maybe a small DOS partition to run LOADLIN? And no, I haven't actually ever done this... so if anything explodes please don't blame me.

http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html

Didn't find it on my 10.2 CD, but I went and grabbed it from a Slack-mirror. Perhaps I could use rawwrite to create a disk image and then use a boot loader to boot from the image, but I might as well tell it to boot from an iso at that point. (plus swithing disk images would be a bit tricky)

Yeah, "it can't be done" was pretty much what I found after a quick search (actually I found your site before posting this questions ) I'm not quite ready to give up on it though, and I'm not going to go out and spend any money on this old piece of crap either. Maybe if I get it working, it will be a good tutorial topic.

Grub for NT hmm? I didn't know there was such a thing. I did a little more looking into this and it turns out that there is something called "wingrub" that can read ntfs partitions and is installed in windows. But wait it get's better... Apparently it is possible to copy the data from a knoppix CD to C:\BOOT\KNOPPIX and tell wingrub to boot from it. If I play my cards right, I can boot into the knoppix ramdisk, repartition my drive, hope to god my computer doesn't shut down, then install knoppix to the hard disk. From there, it should be pretty easy to install Slackware. If I'm feeling brave, I can even skip the installing knoppix part, and do a Slackware network install when I'm booted to the ramdisk.

I should probably practice this first on my Desktop since I will only get one shot at it on the Laptop.

Thanks for the tip! I'm feeling more confident about this now.

...aaron

It 'can be done', but you would need to use a large usbkey. You can extract the cd1 files to the prepped usbkey. I've installed that way once on a old dell sx270 w/no cd or floppy.

And you found that site? cool.

Poor choice of words, my apologies. I thought it was quite a crafty idea actually. Unfortunatly I don't have a usbkey, so for me, it can't be done this way. I wasn't really wanting to go out and buy anything for a laptop that I got for free. I might end up having to if I totally blow this knoppix thing though.

Do you have any experience with installing Slackware over the network? This is how I was thinking of going about doing it, let me know what you think (I always get my best advice from you )

. grab Slackware from a mirror and share it over nfs (desktop)
. boot into knoppix ramdisk from wingrub (laptop)
. install Slackware pkgtools into ramdisk (this is possible right? Is a ramdisk even RW?)
. create a Linux partition and mount it to /mnt/hdaX
. mount nfs share to /mnt/nfs
. go into each directory and use 'installpkg -root /mnt/hdaX *.tgz'
. chroot into /mnt/hdaX and do some configurations, then install lilo.
. reboot into slackware

Does this sound doable at all? Do you know of an easier way to network install?

Thanks for your time!
...aaron

That is the easist way.

Try the zipslack on a recoverable system.

If you can get that to boot, the nfs install option is doable.

The other options are (besides what you described):

• Install over network from setup. But you can't boot setup.
• usbkey boot. But you don't have one. Even a 64MB key, though, has more than enough room to put the bootdisk on it. And they are cheap. I have lots of them around...
• Loadlin. But it requires 'real' DOS, not the fake XP version

That pretty much is it.

Zipslack would defiantly be the easier way to go. The problem is I don't have any fat32 partitions and I don't really know enough about Windows XP to safely resize my ntfs partition. I guess this won't be to hard to figure out though.

Is it not possible to install Slackware from knoppix, or is it just easier with ZipSlack? Granted I don't think I will be able to do all this from the ramdisk. I will probably need to create a couple partitions and just install knoppix to one of them and boot into it before I install pkgtools. Worse case scenario, grub (the real grub, not wingrub) lets you boot to an iso so I can just boot to Slackware-CD1.iso after I have knoppix installed, then run the regular Slackware setup.

I think I will give zipslack a shot first though ...provided I can find away to repartition, install, and then boot to it all without using a boot disk.

Yuck, I have to go read about windows now. Talk to you later!

Thanks!
...aaron


**edit**
I just realized that there is no "first". It's all or nothing. I better make sure I can do this before I give it a shot.

Since you would have to create a partition anyway, skip the added layer of complexity of installing knoppix, and do the zipslack on a small partition.

Personally, I'd wander over to wal-mart ant spend 25-30 USD and get a cheap usbkey (Which works faster/better than a floppy anyways)

Yeah, but wouldn't that be cheating? He's liable to get over there and find a cheap new laptop and then we'll never find out how to do this.

How much room is there on the hard drive? What if you installed Wingrub to the MBR, and added a partition at the end of the hard drive that holds everything you need to install a minimal Slackware? You could end up by using that partition as your swap space. (What I'm getting at is that there should be a way to get more than one shot at doing this...)

I have 18 GB (which is probably the best feature of this laptop), so I am good when it comes to free space. I did a little reading and I don't know if I can safely repartition my hard drive while I'm in windows, then install the stuff I need and expect it to boot. From what I read, it's possible, but also quite possible for it to mess up too.

This might not be the easiest way, but I think the safest would be to go the knoppix route. Once I am in the knoppix ramdisk, I can completely repartition my disk, adding a small (let's say 3gb) knoppix partition, 5 gb slackware, 8.5gb home, and 512 swap. Once my disk is partitioned I can just tell knoppix to install itself to the 3gb drive and then reboot into it.

I think if I can at least get a working distro on there, it will be easier to figure out how to get slackware on it down the road. I would also rather trust Linux to do me good instead of crossing my fingers and hoping windows will boot after a repartition.

If however, I completely hose this up, a trip to wal-mart I shall take.

thanks for the help guys, I'll let you know how it goes!

...aaron

Well here's the update.

I was able to get knoppix running from the hard drive by downloading the knoppix iso image and booting to it via wingrub and a modified boot kernel. I then resized the ntfs partition with parted and created a few linux partitions(make sure to resize, not delete or you can't boot back into knoppix after reboot!). After the reboot, I then installed knoppix to the linux drive and formatted the ntfs. I was then able to extract Slackware's 'pkgtools' to the knoppix root drive, mount the slackware partition to /mnt/slackware, then install the slackware packages by running 'installpkg -root /mnt/slackware *.tgz'. Once everything was installed, I did a 'chroot /mnt/slackware' and editted my fstab, recompiled the kernel, and installed grub. (I usually use lilo but had better luck with grub in the chroot environment).

I still need to do a little kernel tweaking, and I got a minor (probably not important) error when I installed the glibc headers. This stuff will all be easy to fix down the road now that I have the hard part out of the way.

Well I'm off to go play with my new Slack-top!
...aaron