Reboot your system and select the ‘Install Fedora 9’ entry from your GRUB menu.įigure 1 shows what the GRUB menu looks like after rebooting my system.
Now you are ready to install your new Linux distro directly from the hard disk without the need for a CD/DVD drive. Likewise, the menu.lst entry for the ISO file looks like what’s shown below: title Install Fedora 9
Note that this is the location of the Grub menu in almost all distros, except for Fedora/Red Hat, where it’s called /boot/grub/nf.
Now, it’s time to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file on the system I’m currently using-Ubuntu 8.10. So, in addition to the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files, you will also need to copy the images/install.img file, create a directory called /fedora/images, and place the install.img file there. Note: Fedora 10 has introduced a change in the Anaconda installer. If the above mount command doesn’t work, do add this option along with the rest of the mount command above. I have mounted the ISO image without providing the -t iso9660 option (to specify the type of media as an ISO filesystem). Run the following commands to do this: # mount -o loop /fedora/fedora9.iso /media/iso The second method is to mount the ISO image and extract the files. Select the kernel and initrd files, and extract them to the location where your ISO image exists. Then navigate to the isolinux directory-in Fedora 9 these two files are placed inside the isolinux directory it’s often different for other distros, so please refer to Table 1 for the paths. It displays the contents of the ISO image. Just right click on the ISO and select “Open with File Roller”.
You can use File Roller, the archive manager for GNOME, to extract the files. Now extract the kernel and initrd files from the ISO image and place them in the same directory in which you placed the ISO. # cp /home/sandeep/Fedora-9-i386-DVD.iso /fedora/fedora9.iso Follow these steps to begin with: # mkdir /fedora In our example, let’s go ahead and do it with an old Fedora 9 ISO image. The partition on the hard disk holding the ISO files must be formatted with the ext2, ext3 or vfat files system. So, just to be on the safe side, place them in the root of the file system. Some installers are not able to read the ISO images if they are placed inside a directory. The first thing you need to do is place the ISO image(s) inside a directory. These two files are named differently in different distros-refer to the following table for their names. When the real root filesystem mounts, the initrd is unmounted and its memory is freed.
This initrd image contains a set of executables and drivers that are needed to mount the real root filesystem. The only requirement is that you should have a pre-installed GNU/Linux system-which you already have, I assume.Īll Linux installers use two files to boot a computer: a kernel and an initial root filesystem-also known as the RAM disk or initrd image. In this article I’ll share a simple trick by which you can install the new distro without burning it to a CD/DVD. I’m sure a lot of us often face this problem. So you will have to wait till the morning when the shops open, to be able to burn the distro image in order to install it. It’s past midnight and you realise that you’ve run out of blank CDs/DVDs. Now, let’s assume you have downloaded a new version of a distro and are in the mood to try it out right away. I have a habit of trying out every new version the moment it comes out, and I’m sure many of you do too. GNU/Linux comes in many different flavours, apart from the fact that each individual distro has a new release almost every six months, if not less.