booting from an iso without a physical CDROM...

[tart666]

I have a machine with no removable media (no floppy or CDROM)

I have 2k on it, now I would like to add Suse 8.2. The problem is, I need to boot from a CD... Is it possible to boot once from an iso on the HD, and then resume normal booting?

 

[Fiveohhh]

Can you bust the iso open and than run the setup program from dos?

 

[tart666]

Originally posted by: Fiveohhh
Can you bust the iso open and than run the setup program from dos?

AFAIK, the suse boot iso have a linux image in them... It allows me to connect to an ftp mirror and run setup from there... I don't think I can do that while I am in 2k.

 

[jonmullen]

Ok what about downloading something like knoppix. Then make a partition for linux, you can use partition magic or something like that and do it throught windows, then have the system boot to the new partition that you unpacked the knoppix iso to, then you have a host system, then the Suse install might work, or you could set it up through a chroot enviroment. hope this helps

 

[brjames]

I had this same problem... fortunately Suse also comes with boot floppies (there are about 4 or 5 of them, and you'll probably only need 2 or 3 of them. Futher clarification: the first boot floppy is the linux kernel, while the other floppies contain modules. Module disk one is required and I believe Module disk 3 has the network drivers on it.)

Unfortunately I never got this to actually work, but I blame that on the lack of memory (the machine only had 32 MB of memory, when Suse says that the install requires 64. I was supposed to be able to get around this limit by adding a swap partition, but the download crapped out somewhere)

Hope it goes well with you!

James

 

[cleverhandle]

brjames - reread his post - he has no floppy either

Originally posted by: jonmullen
Ok what about downloading something like knoppix. Then make a partition for linux, you can use partition magic or something like that and do it throught windows, then have the system boot to the new partition that you unpacked the knoppix iso to, then you have a host system, then the Suse install might work, or you could set it up through a chroot enviroment. hope this helps

Even if the boot loader code would run off a hard drive the same way as from a CD-ROM (and that's a big if), it would still be coded to look for the root filesystem on the CD-ROM, which he doesn't have. If the machine were running Win98, you could use something like the old ZipSlack or one of the other "run-Linux-from-Windows" distros, but I'm not sure you could pull off an install of SuSE from that. Easiest thing to do, short of the obvious solution of buying a CD-ROM, would be to borrow a friend's machine and put your drive in there, and then move it back over when you're done.

 

[tart666]

ok, thanks guys. So I take it the answer is "no, there's no easy way"...

I do have a spare CDRW, I just wanted to keep this PC as a "network-only" micro box. And I thought for sure at least one of Boot Magic clones would allow to mount an iso from the boot menu...

 

[bocamojo]

Even a network box needs a boot floppy or some other device to initially set it up. Otherwise, it sounds like a thin client, almost. I did have an old laptop once that had both the floppy and CD-ROM go bad on me. I ended up networking it to another PC and copying over all the necessary setup files to it's hard drive, and then running from there, but I already had an OS on it.