On Thursday 02 September 2004 11:45 pm, Eben King wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Jeff wrote:
> > On Thursday 02 September 2004 03:50 pm, Eben King wrote:
> > > When I wanted to install Mandrake 7.2 onto a too-big HD (>528M, 486) in
> > > a machine with no CD, I ended up transplanting the HD.
> >
> > Ouch! You did that the hard way. All you needed was a small DOS
> > partition, ~10 MB or so. There is a batch file in Mandrake, in the
> > /dosutils (maybe it was /dosutils/autoboot/) that would start the setup
> > with loadlin. I had to do that long ago with a Thinkpad that couldn't
> > boot from the cdrom, and had no external floppy drive.
>
> It had no CD drive at all. I suppose I could have whipped up a boot-root
> floppy that NFS-mounted the CD and installed from there (if that's even
> possible). Is your method applicable with no CD drive? (This is entirely
> academic, as that machine has been decommissioned.)
Nope, it at least would require an external cd drive, like a Backpacker or
similar. Looks like NFS or the "stick the drive in another machine" methods
are all that would have worked in that case.
Slackware had a method that could get around that obstacle. You could install
zipslack to a zip drive which gives a pretty minimal install. From there you
could copy that to an ext2 partition (or a FAT partition), run setup from
there and choose whatever else that you wished and install by ftp. I used to
have a copy of bigslack (same thing with X installed also) that I passed on
to people that were interested in trying Linux. Since it would install on a
FAT partition, they didn't need to repartition their drive just for a test
drive of Linux. But the live cd's have made that approach obsolete now.
Jeff
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