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What I did today.
I'm sure at some point, there will be interesting content here again. For now, I'm still deep in the Brokenness of the Computers.
Here, I wrote this up to post to![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
linux4all, but then I was like, no, stupid, go to bed, and figure out the easy way tomorrow, they will just tell you that you are being stupid if you ask. But before I go to bed, for posterity, this is what I spent way too much time today messing with:
The short version of my question: I'm booting from a liveCD, and I have two hard drives. I would like to install Linux (Ubuntu preferably) on one of the hard drives. Can I do it using only hard drives?
Here's the situation:
Due to a broken laptop and perpetual lack of funds, I've fallen back on the old system, which is an eight-year-old Athlon-based frankenputer full of bits of scavenged hardware. It has two hard drives, one with a Windows file system, one with a Linux file system, neither of which have a bootable OS. It's currently running on a Puppy Linux livecd (with a saved session on the hard drive) over the very broken install of Red Hat 7.3, which used to work perfectly but at some point after I started using the livecd, developed kernel panic. I have a casual user's knowledge of linux, not nearly enough to be confident digging around in the guts (though everything that's been done to this system is something I've done.)
Here's what I want to do:
Say "screw it" to the whole setup and finally do a proper full install of Ubuntu (because I know RL people who can help me with that distro, and it's well-supported.)
Here's the problem:
I can't get the Puppy install to burn CDs on the ancient CD burner. So I can't burn an Ubuntu install CD. And I'd like to get the new system up soon, without waiting for one to come in the mail. The computer's too old to know how to boot from USB. I can boot from floppy, but I only have, like, five floppy disks any more, so I can't install the whole OS from there. And I tried installing UNetbootin, which the internets suggested, but it gave me "you have to install fifty gajillion new libraries first!" error messages, which, the whole point of the new install was that I wouldn't *have* to find fifty gajillion new libraries that probably don't even exist in puppy packages yet in order to do anything. And all of the tutorials I can find online for installing from hard drive assume I'm starting from a Windows computer, or at least from a non-liveCD Linux install where I can do things to /boot.
I just want to install Ubuntu on this computer! Help?
(I found http://www.instantfundas.com/2007/08/install-any-linux-distro-directly-from.html , which has instructions for doing it over linux, but it requires that I already have grub, which doesn't seem to be how the livecd works, and it may be on the old broken install, but I can't get the boot partition to mount to find out. I repeat... help?
What I can do is install Puppy to the hard drive, off the livecd, but I think it still wouldn't have grub. And I do have my original RedHat install CDs, but it seems dumb to re-install RedHat - assuming it even works - just so I can install something else over it. Surely I can trick it into treating the ISO on the hard drive as if it were an ISO on a CD!
I'm going to try one more stupid trick to see if I can make it work. And then I'm going to just find somewhere to borrow a $&%^#^$% cd burner tomorrow.)
Like my new icon? ;D
Here, I wrote this up to post to
linux4all, but then I was like, no, stupid, go to bed, and figure out the easy way tomorrow, they will just tell you that you are being stupid if you ask. But before I go to bed, for posterity, this is what I spent way too much time today messing with:The short version of my question: I'm booting from a liveCD, and I have two hard drives. I would like to install Linux (Ubuntu preferably) on one of the hard drives. Can I do it using only hard drives?
Here's the situation:
Due to a broken laptop and perpetual lack of funds, I've fallen back on the old system, which is an eight-year-old Athlon-based frankenputer full of bits of scavenged hardware. It has two hard drives, one with a Windows file system, one with a Linux file system, neither of which have a bootable OS. It's currently running on a Puppy Linux livecd (with a saved session on the hard drive) over the very broken install of Red Hat 7.3, which used to work perfectly but at some point after I started using the livecd, developed kernel panic. I have a casual user's knowledge of linux, not nearly enough to be confident digging around in the guts (though everything that's been done to this system is something I've done.)
Here's what I want to do:
Say "screw it" to the whole setup and finally do a proper full install of Ubuntu (because I know RL people who can help me with that distro, and it's well-supported.)
Here's the problem:
I can't get the Puppy install to burn CDs on the ancient CD burner. So I can't burn an Ubuntu install CD. And I'd like to get the new system up soon, without waiting for one to come in the mail. The computer's too old to know how to boot from USB. I can boot from floppy, but I only have, like, five floppy disks any more, so I can't install the whole OS from there. And I tried installing UNetbootin, which the internets suggested, but it gave me "you have to install fifty gajillion new libraries first!" error messages, which, the whole point of the new install was that I wouldn't *have* to find fifty gajillion new libraries that probably don't even exist in puppy packages yet in order to do anything. And all of the tutorials I can find online for installing from hard drive assume I'm starting from a Windows computer, or at least from a non-liveCD Linux install where I can do things to /boot.
I just want to install Ubuntu on this computer! Help?
(I found http://www.instantfundas.com/2007/08/install-any-linux-distro-directly-from.html , which has instructions for doing it over linux, but it requires that I already have grub, which doesn't seem to be how the livecd works, and it may be on the old broken install, but I can't get the boot partition to mount to find out. I repeat... help?
What I can do is install Puppy to the hard drive, off the livecd, but I think it still wouldn't have grub. And I do have my original RedHat install CDs, but it seems dumb to re-install RedHat - assuming it even works - just so I can install something else over it. Surely I can trick it into treating the ISO on the hard drive as if it were an ISO on a CD!
I'm going to try one more stupid trick to see if I can make it work. And then I'm going to just find somewhere to borrow a $&%^#^$% cd burner tomorrow.)
Like my new icon? ;D