boot disk

[Phil Schaffner]

On Mon, 2004-02-16 at 19:02 -0500, David Hunt wrote:

> Devin Whalen wrote:
>snip<
> I have a laptop with no floppy drive. I have been leaving an old (and 
> stable) copy of Mandrake Linux on the laptop. I boot into Mandrake, 
> mount the first ISO image, copy the vmlinuz and initrd.img files to a 
> /boot/fedora directory, rerun <lilo> so the changes take effect, and 
> then boot into the lilo entry "Install-Fedora" which points to those files.
> 
> On the FC1 ISO these files were in /images/bootdisk.img
> On the FC2 ISO I found similar files under /images/boot.iso/isolinux. 
> These files appeared to work OK.
> 
> I have a fairly non-standard partition, OS, booting setup. Perhaps this 
> doesn't work for everyone.
> If this sounds like something that you would consider, I can provide 
> more step-by-step instructions.

If you want to use GRUB rather than good old LILO, see the thread
"missing boot disk.img" from Friday 2004-02-13.  Relevant info on a
works-for-me approach:

cd [install_directory]/isolinux
cp vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-1.90
cp initrd.img /boot/initrd-1.90.img

Add the following stanza to /boot/grub/grub.conf (assuming /boot is in
the first partition of the first hard drive, (/dev/hde1 for me, more
likely /dev/hda1 or possibly /dev/sda1 depending on hardware config and
BIOS settings):

title Fedora test1 (1.90) installer
        root(hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-1.90
        initrd /initrd-1.90.img

Then reboot into the installer.  Has worked for NFS installs - see no
reason why other methods won't work as well.  Can also make a grub
floppy with a menu so you only have to copy the files to the appropriate
place on each machine.  Can supply a script to create a grub-menu boot
floppy if it would help - seems to be non-trivial.

This stuff really outta be in the release notes. [hint-hint]

Phil