alt install question - laptop with no cd [solved]

slestak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jun 2003 Posts: 115

I have an Athlon 64 Mobile processor laptop with a busted cdrom and no usb boot capability.

I have no problem with losing the existing windows partitions, Im just concerned about how to get an appropriate boot loader and whatnot onto this hard drive.

One thought I had was to move the hd to a desktop (not AMD64, an Athlon XP), mount the drive , partition regular partitions plus an extra one. Move all of the AMD64 isolinux, squashfs, everything from the minimal cd to the extra ext2 partition.

The tricky part, installing grub onto the laptops hdd while installed in the non-AMD64 desktop. Will the laptop be able to run a grub binary compiled on a non AMD64 system?

It still boots win right now, and I have grub4dos installed, and have ntldr set to launch grub. THis wont survive the re-partitioning though since the ntfs fs will be gone (in a perfect world.)

Can anyone advise a safe way to go.

I do have PXE capability in the bios, maybe I can boot the livecd kernel over the lan?

THanks for any input.

skunk · Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 3:08 pm Post subject:

what about reading the documentation?

slestak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jun 2003 Posts: 115

i looked at that a bit yesterday. My question is still if the grub (built out of portage, for adding pxe) on an x86 system will work on a hd destined for an amd64 system. The arch difference is my concern.

skunk · Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 5:34 pm Post subject:

of course, amd64 is x86 compatible.

slestak · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Jun 2003 Posts: 115

This worked out well. The steps I took were as follows:

1) pull hd and put into desktop, boot desktop to existing installation.
2) fdisk hd, make sure to add an extra ext2 or ext3 partition
3) copy all contents of installcd to root of extra partition (hde6 for me)
4) copy contents of /boot/grub to "mountpoint of hde6"/boot/grub
5) edit menu.lst on hde6, make sure all references to the drive address its location in the laptop, not its current location on the desktop.
for simplicity, the kernel boot line I use I removed all framebuffer options.

6) run grub from desktop,
set root to the hde5 disk
install to hd with setup (hd1)

7) move disk back to laptop, when you get to grub menu, if it doesnt boot at first, dont forget the "e"dit commands in the grub shell, you can tweak the kernel and initrd line as much as you need to get the machine up.

After I got a good menu.lst, the machine booted fine off the hda6 partition and the rest of the install was boring (like I like it.)