I have an old Dell Inspiron 5100 that I use for trying out new distros (and doing some whacky things with them ;) ). Unfortunately, the CD drive of my old Dell Inspiron 5100 has been behaving erratically of lately. This kind of gave an impetus to my quest for finding methods to install distros without using an optical drive.
The thing is, almost all distros have "official" ISO releases. Very few of these distros, however, provide documentation about what a user is supposed to do if he/she doesn't have a CD drive. Moreover, a majority of alternate installation methods involve the use of floppy disks. Needless to say, floppy disks and drives have been driven to extinction. So this is an area that needs more work.
My future posts would deal with some strategies for installing linux distributions on your computer without the need of a CD drive or a PXE boot. (these posts would have tags "no-cd" and "install", so that you can easily locate them)
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Installing Linux on your computer without CD drive
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7 comments:
I played around wtih this 'option' too (installing without CD). Thats since my new thinkpad doesnt have CD drive. Tried quite a bit of hacking too.. but finally I had to get an external CD drive from a friend and install ubuntu with that. :(
dude i installed like 5 distros in my old laptop without having to use CD or USB drive.
and it was fast as well
and no, not much hacking required. The only part where you might get stuck is the GRUB entry, but this you can solve by peeking into the boot.cfg or similar file that comes with the distro CD.
Your posted solution didnt work for me, as I didnt have a previously installed linux distro on my thinkpad. It was a brand new laptop with only windows.
The PXE boot, network boot solutions didnt work for me coz my network card wasn't getting detected at boot time.
Which part didn't work? And what was the error?
:)
They would just give up.. saying no network card found! :P
Oh I wasn't talking about PXE, I thought you were referring to installing from another partition. Refer the next post, I have details there.
Oh btw as far as brand new laptop is concerned, you can always use USB install.
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