*** Idea for installing/upgrading below...
"Carson, David" wrote:
>
> I have an elderly laptop upon which I have installed Red Hat 6.0. This was
> an interesting procedure because (a) the laptop has no floppy drive, and (b)
> it can't boot from a CD-ROM. Which is tricky, given that just about every
> installation method relies on a bootable CD-ROM or a boot floppy. How
> exactly I got it working is described at
> http://www.ar.com.au/~storm/toshsat200cds.html but basically it involved
> copying the entire Red Hat CD onto the hard drive, rebooting into DOS (it
> had Win95 installed on it when I obtained it) and using their autoboot.bat
> utility.
I fully understand... I finally broke down and ordered a floppy; BUT Toshiba
could not get the cabling right -- long story and orthogonal...
> OK, that worked fine. But now, I would like to upgrade it to Mandrake 7.2.
>
> Same problem - can't boot from CD-ROM, can't boot from a floppy. But I also
> can't find any pointer to how to kick off the installation from a working
> Linux system, as I was able to kick off the Red Hat install from a working
> DOS system.
Without using the DOS trick again, not sure what to suggest.
However, this fits with something I've been contemplating now that I have DSL
and can consider participating in Cooker activities...
My "Hate List" is ordered this way:
- M$
- rebooting
- down while installing/upgrading
So... anyone know of any catch-22 which would prevent installations/upgrades
being done to separate / & /usr partitions while the system is live? The idea
is to install a new version in background, get all the system parameters from
the running system; then rebooting for a minimum of downtime...
The next challenge would be to switch to the new version on-the-fly; but I
believe that is already being worked on IIRC.
> My guess is that maybe if I added a Lilo entry to boot from the hard drive
> as usual, using the kernel on the hard drive, but with the CD-ROM as the
> root disk? Would this launch the installation as if it had been booted from
> the CD? I suppose I probably should experiment a bit before pestering this
> mailing list, but I'm at work, the laptop is at home, and I figured I'd ask
> now and see if anyone could save me messing around..
Dunno... Would adding a LILO entry pointing to the CD's kernel be possible...?
image = /boot/vmlinuz
label = cd
root = /dev/hdc
??
> Cheers!
> David...
Pierre
