booting from DVD image on hard drive partition

[stan]

On Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:28:43 -0500 (CDT)
Michael Hennebry <hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:

> I managed to boot from the F13, F14 and F15 install isos.
> Still no go with F16.
> 
> To boot F13, I needed to point at a partition
> that was a copy of the F13 iso.
> To boot F14 and F15, I needed to point at a
> filesystem that had their respective isos as files.
> 
> For F15, I did the install.  F16 seems to be impossible.
> I've still got crap.
> Here is the grub stanza:
> title Install Fedora15 from iso
>  	root (hd0,2)
>  	pause have rooted
>  	find  /isolinux15/vmlinuz
>  	pause have finded
>  	kernel /isolinux15/vmlinuz askmethod
>  	pause have kerneled
>  	find   /isolinux15/initrd.img
>  	pause have finded
>  	initrd /isolinux15/initrd.img
>  	pause have initrded
> # ks=http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~hennebry/anaconda-ks.cfg
> 
> I couldn't use the kickstart file.
> I kept getting  messages like this:
> Unable to read package metadata. This may be due to a
> missing repodata directory. Please ensure that your
> install tree has been correctly generated.
> 
> Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for
> repository: Fedora 15-i386. Please verify its path and
> try again.
> 
> The kickstart file is attached.
 
Thanks for the blow by blow, good for future reference.

> The old /boot was /dev/sdb2 .
> The new one is /dev/sda2 .
> When asking where to put the bootloader,
> the choices were the mbr of /dev/sdb or the first sector
> of /dev/sdb2 . I chose the latter.  I'm not sure why the other mbr
> was not an option.

I think it depends on the BIOS setting.  Whichever disk is set as boot
disk in the BIOS gets the mbr (so you can boot from it).  If you want
the other disk to get the mbr, it needs to be the boot disk.  Hmmm,
that seems to be sort of a catch-22.  You probably need to boot a
recovery disk and install the second disk before you can make it the
boot disk.  Or install it with grub directly when you boot it as below.

> When I first tried what was supposed to be the initial reboot,
> my old /boot , now called /shoe , was used.

It must the default in the BIOS.

> I pushed reset, went into setup and reversed the hard drive boot
> order. The result was not quite the blue screen of death.
> It also had the word GRUB.

I can't give you the commands off the top of my head, but I think from
past reading of the grub manuals (pinfo grub), you could have fixed
everything right then using grub.

> I pushed reset again, went into setup and reversed the hard drive
> boot order. This time I went into the grub command line and
> chainloaded into (hd0,1). I am currently using the result.
> 
> How do I make my machine boot with the new /boot ?

Here is the grub stanza I use to boot a version on another boot
partition, where the /boot is a separate partition.  If your boot is
under /, you will need to prepend /boot to the configfile line.

title Fedora 15 sata 1 boot 2
        root (hd1,1)
        configfile /grub/menu.lst

If you use the above in your original grub, you will boot from the
original disk, and then choose this stanza, and it will give you
another menu for the boot partition on the second drive, and you can
choose your kernel there.

> 
> At the moment, I do not have vim or gvim.

No vim?  Are you sure the install was successful?  I didn't think it
was possible to install Fedora without at least vim-minimal linked as
vi.

> Here is what happened when I tried to get them:
> [root at localhost ~]# yum install gvim
> rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /var/lib/rpm/Name: unexpected file type or
> format error: cannot open Name index using db3 - Invalid argument (22)
> rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /var/lib/rpm/Providename: unexpected file
> type or format error: cannot open Providename index using db3 -
> Invalid argument (22) Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto,
> refresh-packagekit Adding en_US to language list
> rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /var/lib/rpm/Name: unexpected file type or
> format rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /var/lib/rpm/Name: unexpected file
> type or format
> fedora/metalink                                          |  24 kB
> 00:00 Could not parse metalink
> https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=i386
> error was No repomd file Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata
> (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try
> again
> 
> 
> How do I get gvim?

There is something wrong with your install.  

You can try rebuilding your rpm database as root.
rpm --rebuilddb
This will take a while, depending on your package count.

Do you have internet access?  You can go directly to the Fedora
website, go to one of the repositories, and download all the vim and
gvim RPMs directly.  Then do a 
yum -C install <list of RPMs here> 
in the directory where they are located.

While you are there, get the F15 repository RPM,
fedora-release-15-3.noarch
and re-install it to try to fix your yum problem.