Hard disk installation

[Hoshinwa]

Anyone know how to install either Fedora 11 or 12 from the hard disk of this old ragged laptop? USB or CD installation are not an option, and since the documentation keeps crashing and I stagger saliently in the messy script that is hid behind the windows interface runtime gimmick, I would like to know which switches would make the rebooting operation take to reckognizing the linux package?

many thanks to who would be so kind and reply as I have tried and tried.

[stoat]

Hello Hoshinwa,

You can install Fedora 11 from its ISO file(s) on your hard drive. You need at least four files...

1. Fedora-11-i386-DVD.iso
2. vmlinuz
3. initrd.img
4. install.img

Note 1: You can also use the CD ISO files instead of the DVD ISO file. Only the first two CD ISO files are needed for the default installation.
Note 2: You can extract vmlinuz, initrd.img, and install.img from the ISO file or download them from the Internet.

Somehow get those files on your hard drive in a compatible partition (FAT32, ext2, ext3, not NTFS, not LVM PV). I recommend that you create a small FAT32 partition for these files. About 5 GB is enough. Copy the ISO file(s), vmlinuz, and initrd.img to the root directory of the partition. Create a subdirectory named "images" and copy install.img there. After the installation you can leave this partition for future re-installs.

You need GRUB to boot the kernel (vmlinuz) and the initial ramdisk (initrd.img). Windows cannot boot them directly. If your Windows system is XP or W2K, then GRUB4DOS is a simple way to boot the Fedora installer's kernel. If your Windows is Vista, then you can probably use EasyBCD and its NeoGRUB to do the job.