FuxoftA.2.5. Booting from hard disk
It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just an existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download hd-media/initrd.gz, hd-media/vmlinuz, and a Debian CD image to the top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure that the CD image has a filename ending in ".iso". Now it's just a matter of booting linux with the initrd. Section 5.1.2, “Booting from linux using LILO or GRUB” explains one way to do it.
5.1.2. Booting from linux using LILO or GRUB
To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in Section 4.5, “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.
If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.
Alternatively, if you intend to keep an existing partition on the hard drive unchanged during the install, you can download the hd-media/initrd.gz file and its kernel, as well as copy a CD iso to the drive (make sure the file is named ending in ".iso". The installer can then boot from the drive and install from the CD image, without needing the network.
For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:
* to load the initrd.gz installer at boot time;
* have the vmlinuz kernel use a RAM disk as its root partition.
Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:
image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
label=newinstall
initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
root=/dev/ram0
append="devfs=mount,dall ramdisk_size=17000"
For more details, refer to the initrd(4) and lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run lilo and reboot.
The procedure for GRUB is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (sometimes in the /boot/boot/grub/), add the following lines:
title New Install
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 devfs=mount,dall ramdisk_size=17000
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz
and reboot. Note that the value of the ramdisksize may need to be adjusted for the size of the initrd image. From now on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO. |