This article goes over installing Red hat from a Hard disk/drive. This could especially be useful if you find installs from your CDs to be too slow or have problems with “missing packages” while installing from your CDs.
The missing packages problem with the installation CDs seems to be more related to the CD Drive (especially if it is slow) rather than the CDs or ISO images. I confirmed this by verifying that the ISO images I had downloaded for Red Hat 9.0 were complete ( using MD5SUM) & successfully running the recommended tests on CDs before installation.
Here is what you can do to get over this problem :
1. Grab the ISOs – if you dont have them. There are a number of ftp sources you can download Red hat ISOs from. I recommed that you check the files using the MD5sum file provided by redhat after download. This page contains good information on how to go about doing MD5 checks in windows.
2. Now copy the 3 ISO files onto any partition on the harddrive on which you wish to install linux. The partition could be a windows partition of FAT/FAT32 or NTFS type. In my case I wanted my laptop to run Red hat on dual boot with Windows XP (which i had already installed) & so I copied the ISOs on to a directory C:\RH\ on my WinXP partition.
3. You now need a method to start the installation from the Hard drive. You could do this in two ways. The first & also the easier method would be to burn the first ISO (the bootable one) on to a CD (You must already be having this if your install failed ! :)). The second way is to create installation boot diskette following the instructions here.
4. If you chose to create the CD, boot from it,
Type “linux askmethod” when prompted instead of pressing enter like you usually do. This will allow you to pick the option to install from the hard drive after going through a few screens. Make sure you pick the right partition and specify the directory (/RH/ in my case) when asked.
5. Sit back and enjoy your installation at blazing speeds that CD installations can never match ! 🙂