Installing Fedora Core from the hard drive

Introduction

In the past I have downloaded the 4 CD's required to install Fedora Core on my laptop since I don't have a DVD burner. This wastes a lot of CD's so I looked into installing Fedora straight from my hard drive. After some searching I found some guides but they seemed overly complex for something that should be simple to achieve, so I decided to write a short step by step guide to installing Fedora core from the hard drive.

Note that I use the DVD iso even though I don't have a DVD burner, this is not important as we will be using the iso direct from the hard drive. Also I will not be using a boot disk so there are no CD's involved at all, we will use GRUB which will already be installed to boot into the disk image.

This guide also assumes you already have Linux installed and use grub as your boot loader but as long as you have grub it will work for any Linux distribution.

Download the DVD

Get the Fedora Core 6 DVD iso from the Fedora Redhat site here:http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/ and save the disk image to a partition on your hard drive that will not be formatted during the installation.

If you have a FAT32 partition that you use to share data with Windows on a dual boot system like mine then this is an ideal place. Otherwise any Linux partition (ext2, ext3) will do as long as it can be read by the installation program (for this reason an NTFS formatted windows partition will not work).

Also make sure that the partition is large enough to hold the file as the DVD weights in at 3.3Gb.

Mount the downloaded iso file

Next we need to mount the iso so we can read the contents, open a terminal and as root run the following command. The iso can be mounted anywhere but in my case I'll create a folder in my home directory and mount it there.

$ mkdir ~/FC6
$ mount -o loop -t iso9660 /mnt/fat/dualboot/FC-6-i386-DVD.iso FC6/

Replace /mnt/fat/dualboot/FC-6-i386-DVD.iso with the location of your saved DVD iso file and FC6 with your desired mount point. Now you should be able to browse the contents of the install iso from the command line or Nautilus.

Copy the boot files

Next go into the newly created mounted files and find the directory called isolinux, it should look something like this file structure as viewed in Nautilus.

From the command line do the following.

$ cd ~/FC6/isolinux/
$ ls
boot.cat     initrd.img    memtest      rescue.msg  vmlinuz
boot.msg     isolinux.bin  options.msg  splash.lss
general.msg  isolinux.cfg  param.msg    TRANS.TBL

Copy the files called initrd.img and vmlinuz to your /boot directory (you will need to be root to write files to the boot directory)

$ cp initrd.img vmlinuz /boot/

If you wish to rename these files to make them easier to identify in the future that's OK as long as you know what they are called for the next step. I'll rename them with the name -installFC6, again root login is required.

$ cd /boot/
$ mv initrd.img initrd-installFC6.img
$ mv vmlinuz vmlinuz-installFC6

Edit your grub.conf

Finally we need to add an entry to our grub.conf file to give us the option of booting into the installer and to tell grub where to find the boot files we just copied. Open the file /etc/grub.conf with a text editor (as root) and add the following lines.

title Fedora Core 6 install
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-install ro
        initrd /initrd-install.img

The title is up to you but be sure to replace the root (hd0,2) with the correct information from your system. The easiest way is just to copy the entry from your other grub entries. In my case I also have:

title Fedora Core (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
        root (hd0,2)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/root quiet vga=834

So just use the value from your other boot target. Also if you renamed the initrd.img and vmlinuz files use the names that apply to you. Save and close the file.

Reboot into the installer.

Next reboot your computer and from the list of boot targets select the 'Fedora Core 6 install' entry. The installer will then run presenting you with a screen first asking for your language and keyboard layout.

The next screen asks for the install source, select 'Hard Drive' from the list. From the screen shown below select the partition on your hard drive that contains the Fedora iso you downloaded along with the directory containing the image (as instructed you can press F2 here to browse for the iso file).

In my case the folder would be 'dualboot' since I saved the iso file to /mnt/fat/dualboot/ but the mount point is actually /mnt/fat so that is not included in the path here. From here the DVD iso will run the installer just as though you had booted direct from a DVD disc.

Post install.

After the install is complete you can delete the iso file if desired but if you don't need the space you can just keep it so you can either re-install very easily at a later date or access the rpm files contained in the iso. The same goes for the grub entry, if you wish to delete or comment out the new entry you can but it does no harm to leave the entry there as an option.