Installing without access to CD burner

b1ind · Guest

I have no CD-Burner personally, nor do I have indirect access to one. What I am wondering is how can I install Gentoo without having a bootable cd? Are there any bootdisks I can use to mount the .iso? If so, how would I perform such an operation.

Thanks

acon · n00b Joined: 23 Apr 2002 Posts: 5

I have actually gotten this to work. This is how I did it.
I downloaded the 16MB iso gentoo-ix86-1.1a.iso. Then I mounted it with "-o loop". In the iso filesystem there is only three files one needs. If I rembember correctly I needed

- stage1-ix86-1.1a.tbz2
- isolinux/kernel
- isolinux/rescue.gz

I placed all in the root of a spare partition that I had created an extfs2 filesystem on.
Then I booted with my trusty grub boot disk (you have one of them don't you) and ran the following commands at the grub prompt:

grub> root (hd1,3)
grub> kernel /kernel devfs=nomount vga=normal load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=22000 root=/dev/ram0 rw
grub> initrd rescue.gz
grub> boot

(Replace (hd1,3) above with the grub name of the partition with the installation files on.)
Then the installation image booted and I proceded with a normal gentoo installation from there.

This procedure requires that you already has a linux system running, that you have a spare partition (you could probably use any partition with spare space on it) and you need grub to boot it.
I agree that this isn't ideal, but it can be done.

Hope it helps!

b1ind · Guest

Well, I suppose I could download zipslack or some such looplinux system to install from. Thanks for the grub commands, as I am very unfamiliar with basic linux commands.

rizzo · Posted: Tue May 07, 2002 2:10 pm Post subject:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/altinstall.html

More or less says what acon was saying, but this is the official gentoo version. OOOOH!

FYI.

squanto · Posted: Thu May 09, 2002 4:22 pm Post subject:

You could always just buy a CD for $5 and help the great people who make all this happen....
http://cart.cheapbytes.com/cgi-bin/cart/0070010805
It has a stage3 cd and some other stuff as well I think, and $5 isn't a bad price, when you see people like RH charging as much as $60 for their pretty boxes.

-Andrew

wahgnube · n00b Joined: 10 May 2002 Posts: 8 Location: Ann Arbor