This is a way to perform a local install of Fedora without needing a CD-ROM. The idea is to copy the ISOs to an existing partition on the machine and also setting up GRUB to boot the installer. This is useful for doing reinstalls or upgrades of the OS.

It is assumed your machine has:

• Grub bootloader
• Space on a partition for holding the ISOs
• A working Linux install for setting this stuff up

The steps will be:

Download the ISOs

You need to have an existing partition that will not be over written during the install to store the ISOs on. In this example I have a partition /dev/hda8 that is mounted as /work that will not be overwritten.

root# mkdir /work/FC4
root# cd /work/FC4
root# wget http://hep.pa.msu.edu/distro/fedora/linux/core/4/iso/FC4-i386-disc1.iso
root# wget http://hep.pa.msu.edu/distro/fedora/linux/core/4/iso/FC4-i386-disc2.iso
root# wget http://hep.pa.msu.edu/distro/fedora/linux/core/4/iso/FC4-i386-disc3.iso
root# wget http://hep.pa.msu.edu/distro/fedora/linux/core/4/iso/FC4-i386-disc4.iso

Unpack the installer

You need to unpack the diskboot.img file. In this example it will be pulled out of the ISO and unpacked.

root# cd /work/FC4
root# mkdir mnt
root# mount -o loop FC4-i386-disc1.iso mnt
root# cp mnt/images/diskboot.img .
root# umount mnt
root# mount -o loop diskboot.img mnt
root# cp mnt/* .
root# umount mnt

Setup Grub

Edit the grub config file /etc/grub.conf to add a stanza for booting the Fedora installer (note that (hd0,7) corresponds to /dev/hda8):

title FC4 Install
        root (hd0,7)
        kernel /FC4/vmlinuz
        initrd /FC4/initrd.img ramdisk_size=8192 text

Install

When running the installer, tell the program the files are local and on /dev/hda8.

Good Luck!

-- TomRockwell - 27 Sep 2005