Installing Linux on a machine without CD-ROM

Quite a few of the new machines (called Netbooks) arrive without an optical drive. However, they are capable of booting off their USB drives, and installing Linux on them is not too difficult. Just get one of the USB distributions from the Net.

However, if you have a laptop without an optical drive, and cannot boot from the USB port either, then the following might be of some help.

1. Remove the HD from the laptop and install it in a USB enclosure
2. Attach this drive to a machine with Linux already installed
3. Use cfdisk to assign partitions.
4. Format the first partition on the disk as ext3 using the mkfs.ext3 command
5. Mount the new partition (say /mnt/disk).
6. Copy the /boot of the machine onto /mnt/disk
7. Edit /mnt/disk/boot/grub/menu.lst, but leave it as hd0
8. Start grub as root, and type:
   root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)
quit


Copy the installation boot image on to /mnt/disk/, and the installation ISO image on to another partition on the drive in the USB enclosure

9. Unmount all partitions on that drive and disconnect it from the host machine.
10. Remove the drive from the enclosure and install it on the laptop
12. When the system boots, go into the grub shell, and type :
    kernel "path to vmlinuz"
initrd "path to initrd"
boot

13. When prompted, point to the ISO on the disk, and proceed with the normal installation.

Tags: install, linux, no optical drive, no USB boot