Christopher Blackmon wrote:
I've got an old Sony Vaio PCG-C1 subnotebook computer that I'd like to install linux on. The problem is that I don't have a floppy drive nor a cdrom drive for it.
I can, however, remove the hard drive, and connect it to another computer. (Right now I've got it in a USB case connected to another laptop).
Is there anyway to do this?
thanks, Christopher.
Do you have a network card that you can boot from? PXE boots aren't that difficult to set up if you have a dhcp server already. The Debian docs are the best I've seen for setting this up.
If network installs are not feasible, what I would do is mount the vaio drive on your other computer after formatting it appropriately, then run a yum install yum command using -installroot or whatever the options is to change the installation root. Pick a kernel and grub/lilo.
After that, install grub/lilo on the MBR for that drive, and run any appropriate mkdev commands (you should have a script that installs with the devs package).
Check /mnt/usbdrive/etc/fstab and /mnt/usbdrive/boot/grub/menu.lst to make sure you're pointing to the right drives for your other computer.\
If you get stuck, check out the Linux From Scratch documentation. If you cant get the above to work with a Red Hat derived distro, LFS will definitely work. I'd recommend for everyone to try LFS at least once so that you know what it takes to bootstrap a distro. The instructions are very good, and easy to follow. Only takes a few days to do too. (Compiling gcc and glibc umpteen times requires stepping away from the project while they run, but otherwise it flies by.)
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