How to install without CD-ROM or USB?

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Sunny0815
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Joined: Fri 09 Feb 2007, 13:07

How to install without CD-ROM or USB?

#1 Post by Sunny0815 »

Hello,

is ist possible to install puppy to a notebook without CD-ROM driva and USB? If so, how would it be done?

Thanks and Regards
Matthias

Sage
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Joined: Tue 04 Oct 2005, 08:34
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#2 Post by Sage »

Presume you read:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=14912
and all the previous discussions on this topic?

norsiwel
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Joined: Thu 18 Aug 2005, 03:55
Location: the coast of Arkansas

#3 Post by norsiwel »

Hello,
I just installed puppy 2.13 on a IBM 760E notebook with 32 meg of ram and no cd-rom or usb.
Here is how I did it, you do need another computer with usb for this method.

1. I pulled the massive 810 mb harddrive out of the IBM and plugged in via usb to my other laptop already running puppy 2.13.

2. I then used gparted to create a 80 mb swap partition and a fat 32 partition using up the rest of the free space on the drive, and set the bootable flag on the fat32 partition.

3. I then used the puppy universal installer to install puppy to a usb device, that being the 810 meg harddrive out of the IBM.

4. I replaced the harddrive in the IBM, and it wouldn't boot, but I didn't really expect it too.

5. I then booted the IBM from a win98 boot disk and ran fdisk /mbr at the A:/ prompt, to reformat the master boot record.

6. On the next boot the computer booted just fine and puppy booted just as if it were a live cd.

7. Then on the logout prompt I created a pup_save.2fs file that filled the rest of the partiton, and its now running puppy from the hard drive without grub.

I used 80 mb of the 810 meg harddrive for the swap partition and used the rest for the fat32 partiton, since the install copied the pup213.sfs file and others to the hard drive the final pup_save.2fs file has about 650 mb of space in it available for installing programs and the freememapplet on the taskbar shows about 67 megs of free memory, at 120 MHZ its not a speed demon by any means, but it is stable and works, however it does take 15 to 30 seconds to open programs like seamonkey or abiword, hope this helps you out, the whole process took me about two hours and was well worth it to save a laptop headed for the recyclers.

(edited for clarity)
Last edited by norsiwel on Sun 11 Feb 2007, 22:00, edited 2 times in total.
the only thing that is constant is change

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rarsa
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#4 Post by rarsa »

Its doable, specially if you know your way around computers.

So actually the question is not "is it doable?" but "is it doable for me?"

Here are the steps at a glance.

Assumptions
- You know your way around computers even if it has been using other OSs
- You want puppy as your only OS on the computer, I'm sure you can play around if you have other needs
- You have access to another computer where you can boot Puppy

1. Do this in a different computer where you can run Puppy.

1.1 Download a distro that supports booting from Floppy (go to http://www.linux.org and search for minimalist distributions, then search for "floppy" on that page) and create the boot floppy as per the particular distro instructions.

Choose a distro that includes whatever file transfer mechanism you are planning ot use. For example networking and a transfer mechanism such as ftp, wget or a or busybox with ftpget. If you need another transfer mechanism (e.g. RS232 serial) you'll have to research how to do it in Puppy)

1.2. From Puppy create a Grub Boot CD ( http://orgs.man.ac.uk/documentation/gru ... .html#SEC8 ). Note that in Puppy the location for the grub files is /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/

2. This you'll have to do on the laptop

2.1 Boot using the linux floppy
2.2. Create two partitions on the HDD, one ext3 for puppy and a small swap.
2.3 Mount the ext3 partition and create the following folders
/boot
/boot/grub
2.3 Connect to the other computer using whatever method you can (network, serial, etc)
2.4 Transfer the following files from the Puppy Live CD on the other computer to the /boot folder
initrd.gz, vmlinuz
2.4 Transfer the following files from the PuppyLive Cd on the other computer to the / folder: pup_xxx.sfs, zdrv_xxx.sfs (xxx corresponds to the version of puppy)
2.4 Transfer the following files from the other Computer's puppy /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc to the /boot/grub folder
2.5 Create a grub menu file /boot/grub/grub.conf (search the forum for examples)
2.6 Boot from the grub floppy and install grub to the HDD http://orgs.man.ac.uk/documentation/gru ... .html#SEC9

That's it.

Another easier alternative (that I don't like) is to use the Puppy install for windows98. that assumes that you already have windows on that computer and that you want to keep it.
[url]http://rarsa.blogspot.com[/url] Covering my eclectic thoughts
[url]http://www.kwlug.org/blog/48[/url] Covering my Linux How-to

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rarsa
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#5 Post by rarsa »

norsiwel wrote:Hello, I just installed puppy 2.13.
I'd suggest that you use parragraphs when you write, it is imposible to follow what you are saying.
[url]http://rarsa.blogspot.com[/url] Covering my eclectic thoughts
[url]http://www.kwlug.org/blog/48[/url] Covering my Linux How-to

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Flash
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#6 Post by Flash »

Norsiwel, your post would make a good Howto if it were cleaned up and made more readable. :) (Incidentally, you can edit your own posts.)

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