Hi all, This maybe a newbie question in which case I apologise hugely. While I'm not new to Linux I am new to bootloaders :-/ I would like to install a custom CD distribution on a system via serial interface (that bit I can do) but the system doesn't have a CD-ROM drive! I'm trying to copy the ISO to the disk and boot from that. So far I have done this... - Net boot the system from a server that is provided for troubleshooting - fdisk, wipe all partitions and create one 800MB disk - mkfs ext3 the partition - mount the partition - wget the iso image onto it - mount the iso image as loopback - copy the loopback image files to the partition Now the original CD used ISOLINUX as the bootloader so I *thought* I could use EXTLINUX to boot this partition and install the OS!? So far I have done... ln -s /mnt/sda1/isolinux /mnt/sda1/extlinux cp /mnt/sda1/extlinux/isolinux.cfg /mnt/sda1/extlinux/extlinux.cfg bin/extlinux -i /mnt/sda1/extlinux cat syslinux-3.36/mbr/mbr.bin > /dev/sda ... bit that didn't work :-/ Any hints would be welcome! :-) Thank you Dan
Dogsbody wrote:> > I would like to install a custom CD distribution on a system via serial > interface (that bit I can do) but the system doesn't have a CD-ROM drive! I'm > trying to copy the ISO to the disk and boot from that. > > So far I have done this... > - Net boot the system from a server that is provided for troubleshooting > - fdisk, wipe all partitions and create one 800MB disk > - mkfs ext3 the partition > - mount the partition > - wget the iso image onto it > - mount the iso image as loopback > - copy the loopback image files to the partition > > Now the original CD used ISOLINUX as the bootloader so I *thought* I could use > EXTLINUX to boot this partition and install the OS!? > > So far I have done... > ln -s /mnt/sda1/isolinux /mnt/sda1/extlinux > cp /mnt/sda1/extlinux/isolinux.cfg /mnt/sda1/extlinux/extlinux.cfgThat should be "extlinux.conf".> bin/extlinux -i /mnt/sda1/extlinux > cat syslinux-3.36/mbr/mbr.bin > /dev/sda > > ... bit that didn't work :-/ > > Any hints would be welcome! :-)Note that even if you can boot, there is no guarantee that the OS installer will be able to deal with not coming from a CD. That's beyond syslinux' control. -hpa