I have a laptop that won't boot off CD, nor does it have a working floppy drive. At first I didn't think I could get linux installed, but then I got this crazy idea.

I've taken out the laptop's hdd, put it into a laptop/usb case and connected it to my desktop system (running Slackware -current). I see the laptop hard drive as /dev/sda and using cfdisk I've created three partitions on it. /boot swap and / respectively.

I've rsync'ed slackware-current, mounted the root partition (/dev/sda3) as /mnt/hd and finally I did a 'export ROOT=/mnt/hd'

Do I just cd to each of the slackware-current/slackware subdirs (a, ap, d, e, etc..) and run installpkg *.tgz? Will this work?

I've already noticed that I should have mounted /dev/sda1 to /mnt/hd/boot, but that brings up another question, how do I run lilo to get the mbr of this drive updated appropriately?

This seems like a novel way to get slackware installed, has anyone else done this?

._.

i guess network install is your solution, see:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=164630"

or try googling for network install on slackware.

The installation mostly worked.

Along with a fstab, I created a lilo.conf based on the one from my running system and used the lilo -C option. I think lilo respected the ROOT= environment (even though the manpage doesn't make any mention of this), otherwise it would have written references to the location of the kernel in the desktop /boot. I think I could have also used the -r option.

One pecularity of the lilo.conf was setting boot=/dev/sda (rather than /dev/hda). This wrote the MBR to the usb drive and not my system's hard drive.

I had also changed the root= to root=/dev/sda3, but this turned out to be wrong. When the laptop booted, it couldn't find the root fs. I rebooted and passed root=/dev/hda3 on the lilo command line and it started right up.

After booting, I reset boot=/dev/hda in the laptop's /etc/lilo.conf.

I noticed a few things that got missed. First, there was no hostname and it came up 'darkstar'. There was also no root password. After setting a root password, I ran pkgtool and ran the setup scripts. I think everything it good now.

One final note, I used the generic 2.6.16.16 kernel and copied over my initrd.gz. Running the pkgtool/setup scripts rewrote the lilo.conf which I didn't bother to edit and without the reference to the initrd.gz, the root fs couldn't mount. To resolve this I had to pull the HDD, put it back into the usb carrier, mounted it on my desktop system, edited lilo.conf (boot=/dev/sda) and reran lilo -c /mnt/hd/etc/lilo.conf (ROOT was still set, otherwise I think I would have just used -r /mnt/hd.

This is a great option for a machine without any boot media, no floppy, no cd-rom, no network card. I think it's so cool, I think I might write up a howto.

._.

It is an interesting excersize...

However, I have to ask: What can you do with it?
No cd, no floppy, and worst of all, no network. At least if it had network, you could actually do something, transfer files, whatever. But.....Even if you can do things, how would you export the results to other people/machines?

maybe a camera or camcorder!

I do have access to a PCMCIA network card, but with no way to boot an installer, this type of install (pulling the HD) is about the only choice.

In this particular case, there was a new hard drive involved. The BIOS couldn't boot off CD-ROM and the Floppy drive was damaged and there was no pre-existing O/S. The old HD had Win98 on it, and if I didn't want to keep it, I could have bootstrapped some sort of installer with it.

After moving the HD to the laptop and successfully booting, I inserted the PCMCIA wireless network card (a Linksys WPC11 ver. 3) which worked WITHOUT ANY configuration (!). (I was very suprised at the no-configuration part. My little AP is open and the card services autoloaded the orinoco module, automatically found the SSID) I was online in no time.

Once upon a time, I had another old laptop, with a floppy drive but no CD-ROM, and in that case I did a PCMCIA ethernet install by booting off a boot floppy; but it was so slow. Pulling the HD would have atleast make the package extraction go faster.

._.