Installing Fedora 13 without CD/DVD, pen/flash drives or any external source

Hi,

I have learnt this method today and i am sharing this with you. Its not a new trick but its very useful trick for those who want to try and install new linux distros without wasting bucks on buying CD/DVD to burn ISOs. Many people might have done it many times but its still very useful. The aim of sharing this trick to you is to tell you how to install Fedora 13 without using a CD/DVD or any external hardware to boot. This will be helpful not in case of fedora 13 only but in many other similar distros.

Prerequisites:
- a working bootable linux box having grub installed
- a CD/DVD ISO image of Fedora 13 ISO

Steps to go:

1) Boot into your linux box (in my case its RHEL 5.5 i am using)

2) Create a directory /mnt/fedora13 and put fedora 13 DVD iso in this folder
- mkdir /mnt/fedora13
- cp /path/of/your/iso /mnt/fedora13

3) Now, we need to mount this fedora 13 ISO to some temporary mount point or location(in my case i am mount it under /tmp2. I have created this directory in my box).
- mkdir /tmp2
- mount -o loop Fedora13-DVD.iso /tmp2

4) Now, Goto the mounted directory and cd into isolinux. Copy the kernel files(vmlinuz and initrd) to /boot of your box with a different name so that the it doesn't override the your current system files say like vmlinuz-fc13 and initrd-fc13.img
- cd /tmp2/isolinux
- cp vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz-fc13
- cp initrd /boot/initrd-fc13.img

5) Now. Copy the "images" folder from the mounted filesystem (from directory /tmp2) to /mnt/fedora13. This images folder contains the install image for the operating system.
- cp -rfv images/ /mnt/fedora13

6) Now, Edit the grub configuration file /etc/grub.conf or /boot/grub/grub.conf and make new entry for the fedora system install as:
- vim /etc/grub.conf
   title Fedora 13 installation
      kernel vmlinuz-fc13
      initrd initrd-fc13.img

save and exit. You can specify the root partition in grub.conf but not necessary in my case.

7) Now, reboot your machine and select Fedora 13 installation in the grub menu at the time of boot.

8) Now, it will ask for the install image location. Select your partition in the list means the partition of the previous linux system where you have kept the ISO in /mnt/fedora13 directory (in my case it is /dev/sda3). Provide the directory containing install image, in my case it is "/mnt/fedora13".

9) Now, install as you install usually. Have fun....:) Finished

In short, we are actually using grub to boot and a hard drive partition to install OS on a different partition. Enjoy...:)