[wellylug] Installing without a CD drive

[Jonathan Harker]

Rob Giltrap wrote:

> I am seeking some guidance here.
> 
> I have just acquired a nice little box on the cheap, a Celeron 500, 
> 128Mb, 6.4GB HD with built in ethernet and a floppy, but no CD drive.
> This will be my mucking around box. The HD currently has nothing on it.
> 
> I am wanting to install linux onto the system and though I could 
> temorarily put a CD drive in it to perform the install I would rather 
> take this opportunity to work out how to install over the network.
> 
> I have a 10/100 router which connects to my primary PC running RHL which 
> holds the ISO's.
> 
> What do I need to do to get a suitable bootable floppy, connect to the 
> network and then run and install over the network?
> 
> So where do I start??

You can start by mounting the iso images,

mount -t isofs -o loop /path/to/disc1.iso /mnt/rh-disc1

or whatever it is (sorry, not to hand). Once that's working, symlink the 
mounted paths to wherever you have set up pub on your ftp server, so something 
like

ln -s /mnt/rh-disc1 /var/ftp/pub/rh-disc1
etc.

burn the FTP boot disk image to a floppy disk, using something similar to

dd -if ftpbootfloppy.img -of /dev/fd0

There's some Redhat specific stuff you'll probably need to twiddle with first, 
like the exact file structure on the FTP server the installer is expecting, 
etc. but I imagine it's not too different from the Mandrake FTP install.

J