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Many months ago the optical drive on my laptop (acer aspire 3000) broke so installing some linux distros is a pain. Ubuntu can use wubi and fedora can install to a flash drive with an auto utility. Recently I lost my flash stick which was 4 gigs. All I am left with is my 320 gig portable usb hard drive. My question is would there be any way I could somehow place arch on this hard drive and install it on my laptop from that? Does it have to be an actual flash drive? My bios can boot from a flash drive but not from a portable usb hard drive. Therefore I am left with limited options but I would like to get arch on there instead of ubuntu because well....ubuntu is bloated and slow.
Recently, I installed windows 7 on my laptop. This was simple: Set the usb hard drive partition to active, copy the contents from the iso then run setup.exe. When I did this windows 7 promptly opened the install screen within windows xp then copied files, restarted and continued to install after the reboot. With arch there is no setup file in which I could perform this task. So what should I do to make this work? If only I had my usb flash drive. There has to be a way to do this from my 320 gig portable hard drive even though my bios cannot boot from it.
Any ideas?
Thanks
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Since the Arch CD is a LiveCD, you could probably do that. Just extract the ISO contents onto the hard drive, boot from a Linux LiveCD (SystemRescueCd works well, or Knoppix, make sure to boot a 64-bit kernel if you plan to install Arch 64-bit (SysRescCd needs the 'rescue64' boot parameter)), mount the USB hard drive, and then chroot into it 'chroot /mnt/myinternalharddrivehere'. You will be, effectively, in the Arch CD. From there you can run /arch/setup like you usually do.
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Post deleted.
Last edited by Wintervenom (2009-01-16 16:13:12)
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I didn't explain that at this moment I am writing this from my desktop which has arch on it. My lap top is next to me with a broken cd drive and windows 7. I wouldn't be able to do much from the laptop since it's got windows on it so I can't use any linux commands using it either. I just dont know what do do :-(
Last edited by silvernode (2009-01-16 16:19:41)
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Related to this topic there is another thread http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=62614 hope this will be helpful.
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The problem remains, even after reading that thread. I didn't try the thread since it was irrelevent. My main problem is not being able to boot from my external hard drive. I can boot from a flash drive just fine but I don't have one of those. I got this big 320 external hard drive and again the BIOS will not boot from it. There is no option to do so.
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Try this thread http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=43169. Hope you can remove your laptop hard disk and connect to your desktop computer with a suitable USB/IDE connector or try this link http://www.sevenl.net/blog/?p=231
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Solved with this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=556230
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