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Use Case

1. When you don't have CD / DVD drive on your system.
2. You have Fedora DVD but your system has only a CD Drive.
3. You don't want to waste time and resources in burning iso on optical media.

Pre-requisites

1. You have a Fedora DVD iso or rescue cd iso.
2. You have a Linux installation on your system.
3. 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 10 on your system and you have a Linux distro already installed on your system. You have downloaded the Fedora DVD iso (Fedora-10-i386-DVD.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.

[root@saini saini]# mv Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /stuff/ [Enter]

Step 2 : Mount Fedora DVD iso on /mnt/

[root@saini saini]# mount /stuff/Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/ -ro loop [Enter] (do as root)

Step 3 : Copy the initrd.img and vmlinuz to /boot/ partition

[root@saini saini]# cd /mnt/isolinux/ [Enter]
[root@saini isolinux]# cp initrd.img vmlinuz /boot/ [Enter] (do as root)
[root@saini isolinux]# cd /mnt/ [Enter]
[root@saini mnt]# mkdir /stuff/images [Enter]
[root@saini mnt]# cp /mnt/images/install/img /stuff/images/ [Enter] (do as root)

Step 4 : Create grub entry for booting into Fedora 10

Add these lines at the end of your /boot/grub/grub.conf file.

title Fedora 10 (New installation)
    kernel /vmlinuz
    initrd /initrd.img

Step 5 : Note the device having Fedora DVD iso

[root@saini saini]# df -h [Enter]
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 10 (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.

Test result : Fedora 8 --> Fedora 10 upgrade

test date: 2009.02.03.
test result: OK.