Installing Fedora From Hard Drive Source

Ever wanted to install Fedora but just did not seem to have enough CD-R's/DVD=R's. Well maybe it is not a super common problem but it was for me. I believe that this method is also applicable to USB Hard Drives so it could be a nice tool for installing on several machines (yes yes, I know that there is a network install that makes that task much easier but come please let me live my fantasy).

The following are the steps that I took along way my way to installing Fedora Core 5 from hard drive source, and thus achieving happy Linux bliss.

1. Download the latest Fedora Core ISO's here. I just saved them in /home/ as they were going to be moved very soon.


2. I installed the hard drive that I was going to be using as the source in my SuSE machine. The drive was NTFS so I formatted it in ext3 ( will work with ext2, ext3, and vfat). If your doing this from a windows machine format the drive in Fat32, NTFS will not work!


3. Burn the first installation ISO's to CD. Really to make this a totally diskless installation you should boot the installation script from your thumb drive, however mine died a horrible death and I have not replaced it yet. As i did not use this method I don't know the exact steps on putting the installer on the thumbdrive. When I get my hands on one I will update this tutorial.


4. Copy all of the Fedora ISO's to the source drive then install the drive on the computer that you want to install Fedora on.


5. Put the first installation disk into the cd-rom and boot up. You should be presented with a splash type screen and a boot options prompt. At the prompt type 'linux askmethod'. It should look like this:
   boot: linux askmethod


6. Hit Enter. Linux should begin loading the files needed and Anaconda (the installation program) After it is done loading there will be a menu asking you your country, keyboard layout, etc. Answer them until you get to the dialog asking for the installation source. Choose Hard Drive and designate which hard drive and partition the installation media is on.


7. Complete the installation answering any questions it asks. The rest should be somewhat self explainitory.

That should get you on your way to installing Fedora Core 5.