Mandrake install from Harddrive help...

[copyright_1978]

I downloaded Mandrake 10 official yesterday and I'm having problems booting from both CD1 and CD2 of Mandrake. It jus doesn't reconise it. Bios has been set to boot from CD drive. Anyway, it failed but I want to try and install mandrake 10 from my first hardrive, does anybody know how to do that?
Do I have to have ISO images? I looked at the install instructions and it says go to this page to make a file:

http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/hd_grub.cgi

The thing is, I don't even know how to use that page.

Help will be very much appreciated.

Thank you.

[mikeL]

Maybe you have a bad download or burn, did you check the md5sum after downloading the .iso file, www.linuxiso.org has a excellent help / FAQ page

[copyright_1978]

Nah, it's a known bug. I just want to know how to install from hard disk.

[mikeL]

So your saying you have mandrake downloaded,on your hard drive, and want to install from there, instead of a CD.

In linux your hard drives are shown as:

/dev/hda = primary master
/dev/hdb = primary slave
/dev/hdc = secondary master
/dev/hdd = secondary slave

If Mandrake is sitting on your C: drive then it will be /dev/hda1

as for the directory you'll have to locate it ( see if /cooker/i586 ) is present, then follow the instructions.

HTH - I never tried to install linux from a hard drive before

Mike

[copyright_1978]

So currently I have mandrake in C:\mandrake\CD1..cd2..cd3..cd4 etc...

so what do you reckon I should do?

I don't even know if I'm asking the right questions.... complete utter noob.

[mikeL]

Are these .iso files?

the easiest way is to burn them to a cd. you should have a "Burn Image" on your burning software.

I ran across this program that will copy the files to your hard drive, this may work for you

www.undisker.com/index.html

[copyright_1978]

Thanks Mike, but I've extracted all the files already. What I think I need is a tutorial on how to install linux from a hard drive.

Thank you very much for all your help.

[mikeL]

Look for a file called " install.htm ", the hard drive installation should be there under alternative installations.

I would look under the first cd file

[kilgoretrout]

It's not that hard. You need to make a boot floppy for the hard drive install. In windows, insert cd-1 and choose the make boot floppy option. That will bring up a little program called rawwrite. In rawwrite, you need to choose an image for making the boot floppy. Navigate to the "Images" directory on cd-1 and choose "hd_grub.img" as the image. Place a good floppy in your drive and the boot floppy will be created.
Next you have to do a little manipulation on the iso files. Since you have already decompressed them, this won't be hard. Copy all your cd-1 files to a convenient windows folder. Next copy your RPMS2,3 and 4(if you have the fourth) directories to the "Mandrake" directory from cd-1. The reason for this is that the install program will only see the cd-1 files if you don't do the above. By moving the RPMSx directories to the cd-1 mandrake directory, the install program will find the rpms on all four cds.
Finally, to do the install, you boot off the floppy you just made and point the install program to the windows folder with the mandrake stuff and it should do the install.
One final caveat. IIRC the mandrake files must be on a FAT32 partition, at least that's the way it used to be. The hard drive install program did not have NTFS support.

[copyright_1978]

Thanks Kilgortrout. I did what you said and placed RPMS2, RPMS3, RPMS4 in my main mandrake folder (c:\mandrake\rpmsx
but it still can't find any of the packages.

Do you know what I am doing wrong?

[kilgoretrout]

I haven't done a hard drive install in a while, but IIRC setting the path to the folder with the mandrake stuff is a little tricky. As I recall, you first select the partition that the files are on and are then prompted for the path to the files. I don't recall wether you set that in unix notation (with "/") or windows notation (with "C:\"). Also, are the mandrake files on a FAT32 partition or NTFS? I think I used to put the files in C:\Linux and when asked for the path after designating the right partition would just type "Linux" assuming that I was already in the windows"C" partition. I think that worked.

[copyright_1978]

Thanks again kilgoretrout, but after reading reviews on Mandrake 10, I think I'll wait for Fedora Core 2 to be released. Which is in two weeks time.

[kilgoretrout]

The mandrake 10 currently available to the public is the "Commuity Edition" which I do not recomend as it's a shake down for the "Official Edition" and not particularly stable. Mdk10-OE should be out in the next couple weeks and should be stable as it will include all the bug fixes from mdk10-CE.

[copyright_1978]

I have the official distro, I'm a member but for all the good it's doing me, I might as well not be.

[copyright_1978]

Okay I just found out that some of my Hardware isn't going to be supported on Fedora Core 2, so it's back to mandrake Linux.

Can someone tell me how to structure the RPMS folders within the Mandrake folder, so for example is it like this:

|--> Mandrake/
| |--> RPMS/
| |--> base/
| `--> mdkinst/
|--> images/
|--> doc/
|--> dosutils/
|--> misc/


So in which folder do I put RPMS2, RPMS3, RPMS4?

I tried placing them in the root Mandrake folder but install coundn't fin dthe packages and messed my comp..

[mikeL]

copyright_1978

This install is way more compilcated then It needs to be, why not just burn the .iso files to a cd, and then install from there. unless there's a specific reason you want to go through all the trouble.

just my .02¢

Mike

[copyright_1978]

Yeah Mike I can see this is difficult but after burning a CD I can't actually boot up from it. If you read my first post it explains why.

Also I actually want to learn about Linux and not just mess about with the bits and pieces the OS has.

[pillainp]

Try this:

1. Copy the three Red Hat images (rh1.iso, rh2.iso, rh3.iso) onto your Windows partition.

2. Extract the 'dosutils' directory from rh1.iso to the Windows partition using any ISO image extraction utility such as UltraISO (www.ultraiso.com), WinISO (www.winiso.com), ISO Buster (www.isobuster.com), WinRAR (www.rarlab.com/).

3. Next, boot into the MS-DOS mode (screenshot 1), and run the autoboot.bat file from the extracted dosutils directory. This batch file contains a 'loadlin' command that redirects to the initrd.img in the dosutils/autoboot directory. To boot into MS-DOS mode in Windows 98, go to Start > 'Shut Down...' and select 'Restart in MS-DOS mode' in the dialog box that comes up.
Since you cannot boot into true DOS mode in Windows XP, you need to create an MS-DOS bootable floppy. To do so, insert a blank floppy into the floppy drive, right-click and select 'Format...'. In the dialog box that appears, select the 'Create an MS-DOS startup disk' checkbox before formatting.

4. After booting into MS-DOS mode, go to the dosutils directory (using the 'cd' command) and type 'autoboot.bat' at the command prompt. (screenshot 2)

5. This brings up the text-based install of Red Hat Linux.

6. Start by choosing ‘English’ as the installation language and a ‘us’ keyboard type. Next, select ‘Hard drive’ as the installation media (screenshot 3). The next most important step is to specify the location of the directory storing the ISO images. Select the partition listed in the standard Linux format (/dev/hdaX). The simplest method is to copy the images onto the C: drive, since this is normally listed as /dev/hda1. Assign the path to the directory containing the ISO images after selecting the partition. For example, if the ISOs are in the 'C:\images' directory, name it as 'images' after selecting /dev/hda1. (screenshot 4)

7. The rest of the installation steps are similar to those in the graphical installation of Red Hat Linux 9.

The above applies to Mandrake Linux too. Just substitute the image names in the applicable commands.

Go here (http://www.thinkdigit.com/howto.html) for the entire article.

By the way, when you said you had already written CD's and they failed to boot, did you just copy the ISO images to CD or did you set your writer program (Nero?) to write CD's from the images? If the latter, it should have given you a bootable CD for Mandrake.