Harddrive Upgrade for Fedora/Redhat

by David K. Levine

Installation of Fedora involves burning a cd or a dvd. For upgrading existing installation this is a total waste of time. Here is how to install from your harddrive.

step 0: get the iso's from http://fedora.redhat.com/ (preferably using bittorent) and put them somewhere on a harddrive, for example in /iso. Important: it is better not put them on the / partition - this partition can easily be busy during shutdown, rendering the isos unmountable during the initial part of the Fedora installation.

step 1: mount the first iso (or the only iso if it is a dvd image), for example
$mkdir /mnt/iso
$mount -t iso9660 /iso/yarrow-i386-disc1.iso /mnt/iso -o loop

step 3: from the /isolinux directory of the iso (in the example /mnt/iso/isolinux) copy the files vmlinuz and initrd.img to the /boot directory, changing the names to something sensible, for example /boot/vmlinuz-yarrow and /boot/initrd-yarrow.img

step 4: find out the hardware addresses of /iso; the df command will show your disk mappings - write this down.

step 5: modify the grub.conf file. In the /boot/grub directory (as root) edit the grub.conf file and add to the end the following entry.

title Upgrade to my new OS
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-yarrow   ramdisk_size=8192
        initrd /initrd-yarrow.img

step 6: reboot. In the initial bootup screen you the final option will "Upgrade to my new OS". Choose that option and the installation program will start. Choose the harddisk install option and the hardware address of /iso from step 4.