I know many people wanna boot Fedora from the hard drive due to the long time wait for booting from the CD /DVD drive. Me too. After several time failure, I successfully boot Fedora 9 Live from the hard drive (now I am in it). I am a Ubuntu user. And there does exist a great user contributed doc talking about how to boot Ubuntu Live from the hard drive. I searched the web but failed to find any similar doc for Fedora. The official doc doesn't cover it in a clear way in my humble opinion. And some people also pointed out that it almost impossible to do so. Thus I hope this mini how-to would be helpful. Note that I assume you already have got a GNU/Linux in your box. Mine is Ubuntu. I also assume you are familiar with some basic tasks like partitioning your hard disk. If you are not, I suggest you stick to the traditional way of installation from the CD/DVD drive. Even if you are, making a backup of your currently running GNU/Linux system is still highly recommended. Of course, if you are very confident, go ahead.
1. Get the ISO Image
Download an iso image of Fedora 9 Live CD/DVD from its website. Save it somewhere. In our case, we download the ISO image of Live CD and save it in `
~/Distro/'
2. Prepare your Hard Drive
Create a new partition on your hard drive using your favourite partition manager. GParted for gnome users, QtParted for KDE users. Or if you prefer the command line, cfdisk or fdisk is there for you. Anyway, create a new partition of size 1GB (750MB should be enough, but I am not sure, anyway, better more than less). In our case the newly created partition is `
/dev/sda8'. Format it. We choose
ext3. The name for SATA/SCSI hard drive is
sdxn, while for IDE hard drive is
hdxn. You should be aware of what you have and choose the right name for your hard drive. But note that GRUB does not distinct them, any hard drive is simply called
hdxn, where
x is the disk number while
n is the partition number. Don't confuse them. For more, read the GRUB manual, by typing the command `
info grub' in your terminal.
3. Dump the ISO Image into the Hard Drive
Open a terminal, type the following commands. Note that the
su-way is for non-Ubuntu users. Ubuntu users, skip the first command `
su', add `
sudo' to each command below if you prefer the
sudo-way.)
Code:
su
cd /mnt/
mkdir iso live
mount -o loop -t iso9660 ~/Distro/Fedora-Live.iso iso
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda8 live
cp -r iso/* live/
umount iso live
Replace `
Fedora-Live.iso' with the ISO image you actually get and `
/dev/sda8' with the partition you created in Step 2.
4. Edit the GRUB Configuration
Open the famous `
/boot/grub/menu.lst' file of GRUB using your favourite editor. Add the following lines to the end of the file.
Quote:
# Fedora 9/10 Live
title Fedora 9/10 Live
root (hd0,7)
kernel /isolinux/vmlinuz0 root=/dev/sda8 rootfstype=ext3 rw quiet liveimg rhgb
initrd /isolinux/initrd0.img
|
Replace `
root (hd0,7)' with `
root (hdx,n-1)' if your partition is `
/dev/sdxn' (or `
/dev/hdxn'), replace `
root=/dev/sda8' with `
root=/dev/sdxn' (or `
root=/dev/hdxn' ) , `
ext3' in `
rootfstype=ext3' with the file system type name you choose for the partition in Step 2, e.g.,
xfs. Save changes to the `
menu.lst' file.
[Updated] According to zod786, Fedora 9 can not recognize /dev/hdxn, it sees all hard disk as /dev/sdxn. So you should set ``root=/dev/sdxn'' no matter what kind of hard disk you have. Thanks, zod786.[Updated]
5. Reboot and Done
Reboot and choose ``Fedora 9/10 Live'' from the GRUB menu.
Once you are in the Live system, you can try Fedora or install it to your hard drive (another partition).
That's all. I know you are curious how I make it, right? The key point is the options to the kernel. I get these options from the `
isolinux.cfg' file lying in the same directory as the kernel, i.e., `
/isolinux/'. Take a look, I am sure you will get it.
Finally thanks to the Fedora team, you have done a really good job! And good luck to you!
Linear Mode
