HD Install :: Installing DSL FROM HD Frugal No CDROM

Hey everyone!

I am trying to install DSL (frugal) on an old laptop, 1.4 gig HD, 40MB RAM, Pentium I. I can only boot from the floppy drive. The machine is currently running Tiny Linux. I can use this system to mount a parallel zip drive and copy files to a HD partition.

I want to somehow install DSL from the hard drive, after copying the necessary files onto the HD via the zip drive.

I made an extra partition, hda3 FAT32, to copy the DSL files onto. I have tried copying the actual ISO and also the extracted files from the ISO. But when I boot up and try to run the install from the HD using the DSL boot floppy, I always am told that the filesystem cannot be accessed.

I am a little confused about what exactly I need to copy to my HD to make this work. And also, can the HD partition be hda3 or does it have to be hda1?

Please chime in I need your expertise and advice on this one!

If I ever get it work maybe I will write up a little howto to folks trying to cope with the no cdrom issue. Thanks!

I just happened to be looking at the frugal lite script earlier and it had some good stuff that might give you some ideas:

Code Sample

mke2fs /dev/$TARGET
mkdir /mnt/$TARGET
mount -t ext2 /dev/$TARGET /mnt/$TARGET
mkdir /mnt/iso
mount /mnt/$SOURCE/current.iso /mnt/iso -t iso9660 -o loop=/dev/loop0
echo
echo "Installing the compressed image..."
cp -r /mnt/iso/KNOPPIX /mnt/$TARGET
cp -r /mnt/iso/boot /mnt/$TARGET

You might want to run fdisk again and make your hda3 linux instead of FAT32. See first it wants to format ext 2. I don't know nothing about Tiny Linux but if you can mount the zip drive then try to mount the iso in a directory on the zip drive if it has room or on another partition. Sorry I am no expert on this and am new to linux also.

I'll try reformatting that partition as ext2, perhaps that will help. I would assume you would have to have the permissions set correctly so the partition can be written to by the installer?

I should have mentioned that you need the floppy dsl bootdisk to get this to work. If you search the forum on "poorman" you will find what I am talking about. The bootdisk looks for the Knoppix on your hard drive partition and boots up like a CD rom. After you have fluxbox up right click to pull up the menu and you can do a full install and not have to use a bootdisk everytime. Tiny Linux might do something with permissions but if you log as root you shouldn't have to worry. You might be able to have multi-booting if you set up grub or lilo right. I am sorry I can't tell how to do that though.

You know, I tried making the target partition ext2, but it was a no-go. It will only work when it is FAT32, don't know why.

I am stuck on command line.

I think my problems are mainly due to low ram (16 MB).

Yup, I am hoping to install to the HD as soon as I get an acceptable configuration happening.

BTW, I am now getting a weird BIOS error message. Could DSL have possibly messed with the BIOS?

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