Install Linux w/o a floppy drive

Is it possible?

[ggrot]

I have a laptop which has no floppy drive, only a cd-rom, HD, and network card. It's running win2k which was installed from the cd-rom.

I've been trying to install the mandrake 8.1 on it from CD, but I get a failed boot from the cd, which the installation instructions explain can happen on certain portables.

Is there any other way to install other than booting from cd-rom/floppy? What about a network install(I've got a hub and another desktop also running w2k). Are there any other easy to install flavors of linux that would be more likely to boot from cds? I would strongly prefer not to invest in a usb floppy as I very rarely use floppy drives anymore.

[littleman]

From the INSTALL.txt out of CD 1:

 4. Other installation methods
 If for any reason the previous methods do not fit your needs (you want
 to perform a network install, an install from pcmcia devices or...),
 you will need to make a boot floppy:
  * Under Linux (or other modern UNIX systems) type at prompt:
  $ dd if=xxxxx.img of=/dev/fd0
  * Under Windows, follow the method described in point 3, but using
  xxxxx.img (see below) instead of cdrom.img.
  * Under DOS, assuming your CD is drive D:, type:
  D:\> dosutils\rawrite.exe -f images\xxxxx.img -d A
 where "xxxxx.img" is one of the available boot images:
  +-----------------+--------------------------------------------+
  ¦ cdrom.img  ¦ install from CD-ROM      ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ hd.img   ¦ install from hard-disk      ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ network.img  ¦ install from ftp/nfs/http     ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ usbnet.img  ¦ id, but using USB network adapter   ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ other.img  ¦ install using seldom used hardware drivers ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ pcmcia.img  ¦ install from pcmcia devices    ¦
  ¦-----------------+--------------------------------------------¦
  ¦ blank.img  ¦ install using your own Linux kernel  ¦
  +-----------------+--------------------------------------------+
 blank.img is a minimal image to customize kernel installation.
============================================================================

[littleman]

Okay reading that over again it isn't answering your question. What about creating a small partition and using the rawrite.exe utility to make a boot image there? Is that possible?

[ggrot]

Yeah, I saw that in te installation, but it indicates that you will need a floppy anyway. The rawrite utitilty wil only writei to drives a or b.

[andron]

I don't know if this will help but I have just successfully installed Red Hat on a ThinkPad using just the CD. Is there a chance that the CD is not bootable? (have you tried it on other boxes?) If it is have you tried to boot to any other CDs on that box?

-Andron

[David]

The redhat install docs say that if you get a boot error that more than likely the boot image is to large for the bios to boot.

You might try and boot the computer into dos only mode. CD to your cdrom drive and then..

d:\dosutils>autoboot.bat

You might see a better error message

Good Luck