Installing from pre-mounted directory
 

Hello,

I am trying to dual boot Slackware with Windows XP, and I don't have a CD burner with which to burn the ISOs. I followed the suggestion on the Slackware.org Installation FAQ:

The problem I encountered with intalling from a pre-mounted directory was that there are two ISO's which I need for the installation process. When mounting the first ISO to the kernel loopback and trying to go through setup, the setup gave a "installation complete" sign before I the packages were ever installed. Similar problems arose when I then mounted the second ISO to the loopback device. How can I get around this??? Is there any way to install slackware from loopback using two ISO's?

I haven't looked at the installer's setup scripts lately, but what you are doing "should" work. ie mount the first ISO and it should prompt you for the 2nd once it sees it's missing packages. This of course assumes you are selecting packages to be installed that aren't on the first ISO. However, if you exit the setup program during the installation then all bets are off, as it doesn't recover from where it was previously, or at least it use to not. So switch to a 2nd console (ie ALT+F2) to mount the 2nd ISO when prompted. You can switch back with ALT+F1. If it doesn't prompt you for the 2nd ISO, then you can mount both ISOes, each in a different directory, then in a 3rd directory build links to all the packages of each ISO. This way you have all the files in one directory, well links to them anyway, and you'd just point the installer to that directory. Here is a script that "should" work for building the combined ISO directory:
I have not tested it. It's some code I ripped out of a script I wrote for combining them into 1 ISO for building a DVD ISO. You'll need to make sure both ISOes are mounted, that $REPDIR exists, and edit it to suit your needs.

Something else you could do is simply extract the ISOes somewhere and use that.

Same problem, no solution
 

Dear all,

I am having pretty much the same problem as the first writer in this thread. I have the 4 CDs that are Slackware 10.1 as ISO files on my harddisk /dev/hda6. Slackware is intended to go to /dev/hda8 (over 3 GB) with /dev/hda7 as swapdrive. The total disk size is about 40GB. Setup works fine, up to the point of selecting which packages to use. I select all (even KDEI, in case I have to type something in Dutch), and hit ENTER. Then I select the mode of selecting packages, and choose "menu" (but I have also tried "full"). After this the system waits for a while, it very quickly shows one or two lines at the bottom of the screen (too fast to read), and then it mentions "System configuration and installation is complete. You may EXIT setup and reboot your machine with ctrl-alt-delete."

The message console (Alt-F4) showed - at least all times I tried - "mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda8, or too many mounted filesystems." No other messages are shown.

I have tried to install using
1) Loopback according to the standard FAQ (i.e. mkdir -p /dos && mount -t vfat /dev/hda6 && mkdir /INSTALL && mount -o loop /dos/slackware/slackware-10.1-iso/slackware-10.1-install-d1.iso /INSTALL )
2) Extract the ISOs into a folder on /dev/hda6 and pointing to that, either mounting the drive myself or asking setup to mount it for me. The last option gives more mount errors under ALT-F4.

I have kind of run out of options here. Perhaps somebody can help me further? I really want Linux and I really want it to be slackware (due to good experiences in the past - it's not my first install).

EDIT: after exiting setup, /dev/hda8 has been mounted correctly to /mnt. Also, it makes no difference whether I use ext2 or ReiserFS.

Thanks in advance,

Stefan.

Hello,

I finally got it to work. Here's how I did it:

1.) After booting to the boot/root disks, (re)parition all slackware partitions as usual (just to erase any data that may have been installed from prior setup attempts, if applicable). If fdisk gives any errors, reboot.

2.) Mount the first slackware ISO on the kernel loopback device from another filesystem, as shown in question #2 of the installation FAQ on slackware.org, by issuing the commands:
Note that the partition you are mounting to /dos (/dev/hda1 in this example) needs to be a FAT filesystem if it is a Windows partition, not NTFS, which isn't supported by the kernel. (I used Partition Magic to convert my Windows NTFS filesystem to FAT32 for the installation).

3.) With the contents of the first ISO in /INSTALL, go through setup, and tell it to install from the pre-mounted directory '/INSTALL/slackare'. Although the GNOME, KDE, or KDEI won't show up in the software set list, the packages should install if the ISO is not corrupt.

4.) After setup, if you want packages from GNOME, KDE, KDEI, or data from the other CD's, 'umount /INSTALL', and mount the appropriate ISO to it using the method described above. For installing GNOME or KDE, simply 'cd' to the directory containing the packages, and run the command './install-packages' to install.

5.) Reboot (duh.... ;)).

Just make sure that the filesystem you're mounting the ISO from is FAT if it is Windows, and that you remember to 'umount' before another 'mount'. I still don't know why setup told me that my ISO was corrupt a few times when it tried to install packages when it was not corrupt, but it eventually worked after I re-partitioned and re-booted.

-Samk

For me, loopback has not worked. I have now "solved" the problem by simply burning the ISOs anyway, and ran into no further problems. However, it is not the most satisfactory way of getting around this problem.

Now I need to get my Wlan card to work and I can switch permanently!

Stefan.

Samk, i can't thank you enough for that walk-through... i was having trouble getting a working install burned to cd due to some unknown problem, however i was able to install everything from the first cd without a single issue... my base system is up and running perfectly and i selected fluxbox as my default x windows system... My problem comes afterwards, i want to install kde or gnome (doesn't matter) but when i browse to the kde dir and use the ./install-packages command the blue package selection screen comes up with a list of default packages checked, it says press enter to install and so forth... but when i press enter i'm sent straight back to the bash prompt... what am i doing wrong?

spudthepotato,

I encountered a similar problem. Try using the "installpkg *.tgz" command as root instead.

-Samk

Revoked. Please ignore.

gargamel

i've been trying to follow but i cant convert my windows drive to fat32, Partition magic greyed out that choice the only option it gives me is to convert to a logical drive.
what partition magic did you use
and if im installing from a different drive instead of a different partition should i just change hda1 to hdb1

alright change of plan converting my windows drive aint happing so does anybody think this can work if i partition my hdd like this

• hda1 /
• hda2 swap
• hda3 format into fat32 from slackware to place my 2 ISO's to pre-mount

so basicly if i partition my hard drive into 3 parts install slack in hd1 30GB make hd2 swap 1GB
and hda3 9 GB either w95 FAT32 or w95 FAT32 (LBA) and put my slackware 10.2 ISO's there to do the pre-mounted install.

and BTW what's the difference between w95 FAT32 and w95 FAT32 (LBA) I'm guessing that w95 stands for Windows 95 but as for the (LBA) thing I'm clueless I'm thinking i should format it in the first one.

oh yeah and if i format hda3 in FAT32 windows will see it right otherwise i wont be able to get my ISO's there.


[part 1]

O.k partitioned my hdd in slackware with cfdisk like i said above set hda3 to 0B with 1.9GB what was the point in giving it 9GB so wrote to table/disk but forgot slack only formats in 3 ways so i booted up windows and formated it from there drag and dropped the ISO's and thats as far as i've got as of now so post back in a few hopefully it will be a success story.
oh well time will tell


*

followed your instructions to a T and so far so good the first ISO is flying just waiting for the prompt for disk 2 even do i'm gonna be using Fluxbox which is on disk1 i believe still like to have everything.
O.k maybe i misunderstood no need for 2nd do that bit manually


[/part 3]

all done and dusted no probs as of yet i've config'd xorgconf
gfx/snd cards up and running just got to get up to date with a few files and tweak fluxbox to perfection

oh yeah edit my distro in my profile 10.0 to 10.2 :D
---Slackware 4 life

"go through set-up" means what exactly...
 

OK everything is great right until i get up to step 3.) I see the new files in the INSTALL/slackware directory but... How do i DO this?? When I give the install command from within the /INSTALL/slackware directory it asks for a destination? I am attempting to install disk 1. This is my initial install on a clean hard drive. I have a swap, /home, /var, and / partitioned. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thanks-
SlowLearner

Did you try running the "setup" command? That's what it means when you read "go through setup".

Perhaps a good thing to do at this point, is to read http://slackbook.org/html/installation-setup.html

Eric

Setup: command not found
 

Yes. Will detail further below..

Oddly enough this was actually a very informative comment for me so, THANK YOU, Eric.

omg reading. I have read and re-read and learned soooo much about linux since I began this little project 2 weeks ago. My first attempt to migrate to Linux via a boxed copy of RedHat 8.0 in 2002 ended in failure after investing about 120 man hours.

I have invested about 80 man hours so far in 2011 on this go round with Slackware 13.1 and yes, while I have learned a great deal READING the slackbook and rute and many great forum threads and man pages. A functional booting system would greatly increase my learning curve.

user@debian:~$ setup
bash: setup: command not found
user@debian:~$ sudo setup
sudo: setup: command not found
user@debian:~$ cd /
user@debian:/$ setup
bash: setup: command not found
user@debian:/$ sudo setup
sudo: setup: command not found

I am guessing that this has something to do with my less-than-orthodox method of install. I booted from a version 0.8.1 g-parted disc. Partitioned /,/home,/var and swap. Performed Samk's loop described here pulling iso files from USB and now have 307mb in /var, 502mb in /home and 307 mb in /root. But nothing in swap. Which i believe needs lilo, bzImage and initrd.img or something along those lines to boot.

I assume the setup command will do this but haven't figure this out just yet. While typing this post I discovered that G-parted provides a lightbulb "Info" icon on its desktop. Clicking this brings up a dialog box titled INFORMATIONS. - Select items from the list below:

• List of Packages
• Windows Information

Selecting the List of Packages option brings up a 2 column list with approximately 300 packages listed alphabetically along the left and the word install down the page in the second column. A few of the 300 packages listed include:
adduser
base-files
console-data
console-setup
grud-common
live-boot
live-boot-initramgs-tools
live-config

But NO:
Lilo or bzImage and initrd.img...
Makes me wonder if I am looking at info that will install g-parted onto my hard drive. Not at all my intention.

I have burned 8 copies of slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso with infra-recorder,power2go and roxio and every one of them concluded the burn some type of error code i never was able to intrupret and predictably, would not boot system.

I have configured a usb boot which contrary to Intel's own documentation does not boot.

Now it appears I have managed to get the contents of slackware 13.1 disc 1-3 ON to my hard partitioned hardrive but not "installed"

Any further assistance offered would be greatly appreciated.

Reading documentation is actually one of the fastest way to learn something ;-)
Actual hands-on experience is another sure path to knowledge, but somethimes you just have to read first to see why the things you try are not working the way you think they work.

Installing Slackware usually involves booting from a Slackware install medium. That can be a DVD, or the first CDROM in the Slackware set, or a bootable USB thumbdrive. The "setup" program is part of the "Slackware installer" which is not part of the Slackware you install as packages... it is only present on the bootable medium.

The Slackware installer's "setup" program guides you through the steps of activating a swap device, formatting your partitions, selecting the packages to install, installing these packages and then configuring your system for first use.

You seem to be skipping all of that by trying to install Slackware from a debian system you booted into. That is making it hader to install Slackware, but not impossible.
What you absolutely need is to have the Slackware pkgtools installed on the computer you are running if you want to install Slackware on one or more empty partitions of your hard disk (or in a subdirectory of your filesystem if you never intend to actually boot into Slackware but use it in a "chroot").

This will not be easy if you are not running Slackware already.

So why not go the failsafe way and install Slackware by booting off a Slackware install medium? If you are having issues burning an ISO image to DVD or CDROM, you can always try to create a bootable USB thumbrive containing nothing else but the installer. You can then use the ISO image on the harddisk as the source where "setup" will take the installable packages from.

A USB image that you can copy to a USB thumb drive using "dd" (thereby overwriting all data on that USB stick) can be found in the "usb-and-pxe-installers" directory of Slackware. There you will also find a README_USB.TXT with helpful hints.

And if you want to create a more fully-fledged USB based installer, you can also read http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/ (instructions for Windows users) or http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/inst...b-thumb-drive/

Eric

I have not been able to burn without errors.

I created one. HOWEVER Intel's BIOS contrary to their own documentation does NOT support USB Boot.

"I have not been able to burn without errors."

Maybe you have bad cd burner, or maybe not...
Which software were you using to try burning the cd/dvd and what were the errors?
Did you verify you downloaded image before burning?

If your drive can read medium, but not burn because sometimes only burning capabilities go out (I've lost them to hard freezes) then maybe you can use friend or colleague's machine to burn cd/dvd...

Otherwise, since your bios doesn't allow booting from USB, you could, from the debian install you are working from, use a tool like gnu parted to shrink a partition on your drive and create space for a new partition. You can use fdisk to create a new partition. And then you could use dd to clone the slackware installation .iso onto the new partion. You would also have to alter the lilo or grub (bootloader) configuration on the debian system to make the new partition available as an option during boot time. After that you could boot the slackware installer, and then have access to that setup command!

I did finally get a operable burn just NOT of the full Disc 1
Details of the experience are below, perhaps it'll help someone else one day.

dc4bbf11c0779e2ef16c8aca99aeabd0 slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso

Yes, I verified "MD5 Check Sums are the same."

ISO Recorder Software- "Operation has failed. Code:80004005, Reason: Unspecified error"

InfraRecorder Software version 0.51.0.0 (x86) - "Process exited with code: 254."

Roxio Software - "Roxio failed to burn this disc (Extended error: 0x80041024)."

Power2Go Software- I failed record the error message from Power2go.

All of these variously burn media result in a "Disk error 20, AX=42FD, drive EF" error message during attempts to boot slackware 13.1.

Burns were attempted using both 650MB Zenith and 700MB Optimum CDR media. I followed the various documentation instructions to complete the burn attempts and I have successfully burned iso images using both this media and these DVD-RW's in the recent past. Infra-Recorder is usually my software of choice. However, no such luck this time.

HOWEVER - onebuck pointed me to Slackware 13.1 mini-iso designed, compiled and provided by none other than our very own Alien Bob

The iso-mini is specifically designed for those "planning to install Slackware using packages on a local hard disk partition, or from a NFS/HTTP/FTP server...The mini-ISO image of less than 40MB in size contains everything to let you
do the above, and nothing more" -basically, for whatever reason the smaller iso image burned quick and clean on first attempt and let me boot into Slackware Set-up. YAH!

I deleted my partitions with cfdisk. Ran the:
loop courtesy of samk

Everything seemed good, but I am still have issues. As in, I still can't boot without the mini-iso CD installed. Not sure why yet. Still working on it. I don't think the loop installed lilo in a bootable sector. I made my first partition swap instead of root.. and not sure yet even where lilo even is. But making progress now at least I can boot into a slackware setup.

Never a dull moment,
SlowLearner

You do not have to do that manually. I'll let you in on a secret: if you do not loop-mount that ISO first, and instead for "pre-mounted directory" you enter the directory name where you keep the (DVD-) ISO image, then the installer will loop-mount the ISO for you at the proper location. It will then proceed with the next step (selecting the packages you want to install).

To me that sounds like you never installed lilo at all. If you are able to successfully boot into your Slackware system using the mini ISO , then perhaps all that's needed next is to run the command "lilo" once. Then try to reboot without the CDROM.
Also, post your /etc/lilo.conf file here.

Eric

the installer will loop-mount the ISO for you at the proper location
 

Alien Bob - THANK YOU for all your contributions to PXE boot wiki, the USB install tools and help you offer, the mini-iso I used to get this far and all your contributions to this forum. Your work is GREATLY appreciated.

You were RIGHT ! I couldn't whereis or find lilo anything anywhere on my PC

I still don't have one...

REALLY This sounded great to me. I deleted my old partitions, reformated got into setup and was working through TARGET Set up your target partitions when I came to:

"PICK MOUNT POINT FOR /dev/sdb1 # this is the USB where my slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso is
Now this partition must be mounted somewhere in your directory tree. Please enter the directory under which you would like to put it.For instance, you might want to enter /fat-c or something similiar. NOTE: This partition won't actually be mounted until you reboot. Where would like to mount /dev/sdv1?

I thought this might be an issue... but I gave it the name /DOS and set-up brought me to SOURCE Select source media - I chose Install from a pre-mounted directory

You will need to type in the name of the directory containing the subdirectories for each source disk.. Which directory would you like to install from?

Nothing I try to enter here seems to work for me:
/DOS
/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso
/dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1/DOS
/dev/sdb1/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso
/etc/ftab
/etc/fstab/dev/sdb1/DOS
/etc/fstab/dev/sdb1/DOS/slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso

Each of these result in the following error message:

What am I missing??

You are not understanding what the "TARGET" means. The TARGET section of the setup lets you assemble your future filesystem by attaching the various disk partitions to mount points.
You do not want the partition of your USB stick to be permanently listed in your computer's /etc/fstab ... because Slackware will try to mount the partition every time you boot the computer.

What you need to do instead, is mount the disk partition where you keep your Slackware ISO before you start the "setup". That's why it is called a "pre-mounted directory". The smartest thing to do, is to create a new directory for mounting that partition (for instance: "mkdir /mypart ; mount /dev/sdX1 /mypart" if your ISO file is on the disk partition /dev/sdX1).

Continuing with my example. The SOURCE is where setup will get the Slackware packages. Suppose you have mounted the partition with the Slackware ISO on a directory "/mypart" which you created just for this purpose, and the directory on that partition where you keep the ISO image is called "/somedirectory" then you would type the following pathname: "/mypart/somedirectory". Looking at your post, you have the ISO in the root of the partition so then you would type "/mypart".

Eric

"System configuration and installation is complete" BUT NOT!
 

wow, ok yeah clearly I had no idea. THANK YOU for clarifying that for this newbie.

From the root prompt I made /mypart and mounted my USB drive to it with mount /dev/sdb1 /mypart

ls /mypart -l #now yields
root root 619mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d1.iso*
root root 704mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d2.iso*
root root 679mb mar 12 slackware-13.1-install-d3.iso*

Went into setup formatted root /boot /home /usr /var

Told setup to install from /mypart

Package Series Selection only offers:[*] A Base Linus system <OK>

I selected full <OK>
less than a 3 seconds later "System configuration and installation is complete"

I know there is no way the iso installed that fast.. do i need to EXTRACT the iso first or something?? I am at a loss again.

Just for grins I selected "newbie" verbose prompting mode next time.
I never got any prompts it SAID I had selected newbie verbose prompting then fairly immediately I get the SETUP COMPLETE dialog box.

I tried to look at my root partition /dev/sda3 and get a
"according to mtab, dev/sda3 is already mounted on /mnt
soooo setup was trying to do it's thing.
du /mnt -ch yields 17K about 15 files boot files,usr,home,var/logs (I haven't figure out how to 'read' the contents of.- THAT might be helpful)


Does anyone know what step I am missing to complete a "Install from pre-mounted directory"?

And thanks for reading my futile rambles this far.

I implied it already when I wrote, "you enter the directory name where you keep the (DVD-) ISO image" but you can only use the DVD ISO image for automatic loop-mounting... the setup looks specifically for "slackwar*-install-dvd.iso" in the directory you specify.

If you have only the 3 CDROM ISO images but no DVD ISO then you'll have to fall back to manual loop-mounting all three of them.

Eric

oh wow, ok, no problem.
I did NOT catch that or even think of it, but yes ok good for newbies to know - DVD ISO will work different than a CD ISO.

DVD ISO setup will mount and loop from the installer when chosing Install from a pre-mounted directory

CD ISO needs to be manually mounted and looped into a newly created directory prior to entering SETUP and selecting Target.

The method to this madness can be found earliar on this thread in post #4 by samk

My own install is actually happening on to desktop hard drive as I type this on the laptop, right now. YAH!

Now that this little portion of just a simple install of operating system is drawing to a close for me I am just now beginning to understand what is happening behind the curtain during the install. A big advantage to linux of windows is that there IS no curtain.

Much sincere thanks to you Alien Bob for all your patience with this newbie.

Thank you for your post and nice Slackware USB-installer! I use this trick yesterday and successful install it on my PC for first time =)

So, if I am currently using ubuntu and have a seperate /home directory will it work if I copy the contents of the first three cd ISOs to /home/user/slackinst/ and then directly after I boot from USB stick before I run setup mount the directory with something like mount /dev/sda5/home/user/slackint /slackinst