[NCLUG] Hard drive only Linux install.

[Darrin Goodman]

Hi Kyle, 

I had a similar experience: Xubuntu is running on my Dell Inspiron laptop.
Because my lcd is starting to go bad, rather than replacing the lcd, I
thought that I would try removing my hard drive and then place it into
another Dell Inspiron of a similar vintage.  The hardware was pretty similar
between the two machines; however, there were some subtle differences, such
as the hard drive was coming out of a P4 machine and going into a P3
machine.  I could not get it to boot on the P3 machine.  It's been a while
since I tried this so I honestly don't recall what sort of errors were
produced when I tried to boot the P3 machine.  

Since I've only been using Linux seriously for just over a year, I would
hardly call myself an expert, but with having past experiences of installing
Gentoo and Debian (along with the easier installs such as FedoraCore,
Xubuntu, SuSE, and others), my understanding of the install process is that
the OS is compiled specifically for the machine that you are performing the
installation on.  We can see this machine-specific customization process
take place more with distros like Gentoo and Debian since they tend to be
manual style installs, whereas Xubuntu, FC, SuSE, etc. tend to be more GUI
based installations and the CD does most of the work for you (so the
machine-specific customizations to the OS all takes place behind the
scenes).  

I'm not sure that you can swap the hard drive between machines, once the OS
has been configured for a particular machine.  I would love to know if
anyone has been successful with this sort of thing, and what they did to
make it work.  Thanks!

- Darrin


-----Original Message-----
From: nclug-bounces at nclug.org [mailto:nclug-bounces at nclug.org] On Behalf Of
Haefner,Kyle Anson
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 4:25 PM
To: nclug at nclug.org
Subject: [NCLUG] Hard drive only Linux install.

Hello all,

I was hoping to install xubuntu
on ye' old laptop without cdrom/floppy/usbboot/ethboot.  My plan was to
installl from the
hard drive. I put the hard drive in a laptop with a cdrom and booted the
live cd.
I partitioned the hard drive into three
partitions a "boot" partition to hold grub vmlinuz and initrd, and an "iso"
partition to hold the live cd ISO.

I ran grub-install, made a menu.lst and rebooted.  The machine booted up and
I was presented with the
BusyBox commandline.  Wasn't sure how to go from there...

I could mount the ISO partition, and then tried to loop mount the ISO.  It
didn't work. :(

Does anyone know how to install linux using only the hard drive?

kyle