Use Case
-When you don’t have CD / DVD drive on your system.
-You have Fedora DVD but your system has only a CD Drive.
-You don’t want to waste time and resources in burning iso on optical media.
Pre-requisites
-You have a Fedora DVD iso or rescue cd iso.
-You have a Linux installation on your system.
-You have a partition (FAT32, ext2, ext3) which you will not format while installing the new OS.
How to proceed
Let us assume you want to install Fedora 9 on your system and you have a Linux distro already installed on your system. You have downloaded the Fedora DVD iso (Fedora-9-DVD-i686.iso). And you have a FAT32/ext2/ext3 partition /stuff/ which you will not format during installation.
Step 1 : Move the Fedora DVD iso to /stuff/ directory.
Step 2 : Mount Fedora DVD iso on /mnt/
Step 3 : Copy the initrd.img and vmlinuz to /boot/ partition
Step 4 : Create grub entry for booting into Fedora 9
Add these lines at the end of your /boot/grub/grub.conf file.
kernel / vmlinuz
initrd / initrd.img
Step 5 : Note the device having Fedora DVD iso
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use % Mounted on
/ dev / sda3 15G 9 .5G 4 .1G 70 % /
/ dev / sda8 135G 116G 13G 91 % / stuff
/ dev / sda5 4 .8G 1 .2G 3 .4G 26 % / home
/ dev / sda1 99M 12M 82M 13 % / boot
In this case /dev/sda8 contains Fedora DVD iso. Note this down as you need it later.
Step 6 : Reboot
Reboot your system and boot into the Fedora 9 (New installation) grub entry.
Step 7 : Install from hard disk
While in installation wizard, select “Hard drive” as installation method and choose /dev/sda8 as it contains the Fedora DVD iso. And rest is damn easy.