[SOLVED] Way to boot from ISO on hard drive, then install to the same drive?

[Moderator BobC]

I have an old PIII from 1998 that can’t boot from USB and doesn’t have a DVD drive, but does have WiFi and some space, so I could boot to CD, connect, download ISO, add ISO to grub, update grub, reboot from loopback ISO, then install to same or different partition.

Any ideas?

Other possibilities would be scavenge a 2nd drive if that might help, or steal DVD out of other working system (I have many CD drives, but not DVD’s)

I have tried this and can boot but get error early in boot:

Mounted boot device. Mounted device /dev/sda2 at /live/iso-dev
error: df: /live/boot-dev: can’t find mount point

It boots and seems to run ok, but the installer won’t offer any drives to install to.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by BobC.

[Moderator christophe]

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How about this:

1. Mount the ISO.
2. Copy the “antiX” directory from the ISO to the hdd.
3. Boot that directory as a frugal install.

I know it’s not exactly what you are looking for, but it should work.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by christophe.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by christophe.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Anonymous]

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If you can partition the drive in another machine and copy the iso to it.
The installer should be able to install the directories and grub to the
same drive. I.E. might have to be pre-partitioned/formatted in order for
the installer to work properly.

[Member cpoakes]

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Yes. Here’s how I have done it (multiple times).

1. Configure grub to loop boot the ISO.
2. Boot the ISO.
3. Modify /sbin/partition-info on the booted ISO, and delete or comment out line 191.
4. Start the installer. The boot drive will be installable now.

Caveat: don’t install over the partition holding the ISO image; use another partition.

Script to modify /sbin/partition-info:

#!/bin/sh 
#  preinstall
#    Modifications to the native installation media/environment before install
#    (originated with antiX).
    
# ROOT: only root user
[ ! <code>id -u</code> = 0 ] && echo "Must have superuser permissions" && exit 1

# ANTIX: modify installer to install on boot device
ANTIXFILE=/sbin/partition-info
if [ -f $ANTIXFILE ] ; then
    sed -i "s/\(.*EX_BOOT.*test.*LIVE_CONFIG\)/#\1/" $ANTIXFILE
fi

[Anonymous]

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Thx cpoakes,

I was thinking seperate directories and not letting the installer
format.

Caveat: don’t install over the partition holding the ISO image; use another partition.

important that the installer never format the booting partition.
never tried editng grub directly.

[Moderator BobC]

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Thanks, I will see if I can try this tomorrow.

[Moderator BobC]

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cpoakes,

Thanks so much! All I did was run the cli-installer after that and it worked. It would be neat if the script would just ask if you need to install to the boot drive.

[Member PPC]

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BobC, I’m late to the thread, congratulations on giving a bit more life into that museum grade computer 🙂 … I was the guy that made a post on a thread, replying to you, mentioning booting the ISO from hd and trying to install from there (I believe it was one of the antix19 alpha or beta threads)-
I boot ISOs from hd frequently, but I never did try to install from there… It makes sense that you can’t install to the same partition where you are running the ISO from, but I never thought about the installer not allowing, out of the box, to install to a different partition of the same drive… sorry for that.
If you ever need to install a new system on that computer, if you do manage to use a sub pen drive, but you just can’t boot from it, try plop, at https://www.plop.at/ It has a “miraculous” way of letting the user boot from CD and then choose to boot from a pen drive, even when bios does not allow that… You can even add that to your GRUB and boot to
USB from there, without needing to boot from CD first…

P.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by PPC.

[Moderator BobC]

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So far, I don’t have anything USB working on either of the Pentium III machines. The PIII-400 only has 256 mb, and I couldn’t get any of the nVidia cards in that one to work, either, but on the 10th card I found an old Number 9 PCI card that would do 800×600. All the nVidia based cards would only do 640×480. I still need to get WiFi working from one via USB because I only have one PCI WiFi card. Back then all my machines were hard wired, but the cables to that room are gone, now. It’s kinda like assembling a car from pieces of different cars found in a junk yard 🙂

[Anonymous]

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Hi BobC,

On those old nvidia cards and others you might have to manually create
the xorg file and force it to load the vesa or modesetting driver to get
higher resolution.

[Moderator BobC]

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Linuxdaddy, they all used to just work. Nothing nvIdia works on the old machines other than 640×480 with nouvrau under debian buster or antiX19 so far. They all work fine with Knoppix 8.1.

I dont know what to give them to get them to work manually. I think the best thing to do is to open a separate thread. Maybe someone has figured out how…

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by BobC.

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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Knoppix 8.1 is stretch based isn’t it?

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

antiX with runit - leaner and meaner.

[Moderator BobC]

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Yes, Stretch based all seem to work without doing anything unusual. Thanks for looking at it…

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