Booting RedHat setup without cdrom or boot disk

Why would you need to boot setup either without a boot disk or a boot CD-Rom. Well some coputers (laptops, and old pre-Pentium) can not boot from cdrom and have no floppy disk drive, or you can only have the floppy drive or cdrom drive. This makes it almost impossible to boot from floppy disk then continue the boot from CD-Rom.

So what do you do about it, well you can follow these instructions, or download the zip file

This is what you do.

Make a folder on you hard disk. I called mine test.
Get your redhat CD.
Now Redhat did have a batch file to boot the disk from dos, but with the latest version I'm found that it does not work.

So here are the files you need. Lets presume your cdrom drive is drive g:, mainly because that's mine, and I can just cut and copy the locations.

You need these files:
G:\dosutils\autoboot\vmlinuz
G:\dosutils\loadlin.exe
G:\misc\src\trees\initrd-local.img

so put all these in the folder on the c: drive that you made before.

Then make a batch file with this line in it:

loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrd~1.img

Then boot into Dos, then run the batch file.

This will boot linux and start the install process.

Well that's it.

If you think this could be improved in some way, don't hesitate to rewrite it...

Ian.
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