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I have an old laptop that does not have a CD drive and cannot boot from a USB device. It's only a 133MHz Pentium with 96M of RAM and a 3.2G hard drive. Still has the Windows 98 it came with. Since i686 code does not work on Pentiums, am using Arch Linux from http://archlinux-i586.org.
Last time I installed Linux on it, I used Zenwalk Linux 4.8, and was able to boot the kernel with Loadlin, then install from an ISO file on the Windows partition. Loadlin is no longer maintained, and seems it does not work on 2.6.23 or newer kernels. It could not boot the Arch kernel. (As to installing a newer version of Zenwalk, the installation CD has grown too large to fit on the Windows partition.) I found Grub4DOS, and have been able to boot Arch with that. Zenwalk uses LILO. I added an entry to LILO to boot Grub4DOS, which then boots the Arch Linux ISO file. (A major difficulty here was getting that ISO file into a contiguous block on the FAT file system so Grub4DOS would boot it. In most scenarios, the iso file is copied to RAM but 96M isn't enough to do that.)
I am stuck at at the point where the Arch Installation tries to find the CD. There isn't one of course, and I get the message "Waiting 30 seconds for device /dev/archiso" Trying manual mounting, I can mount the FAT partition containing the ISO file, but have had no luck with "mount -t iso9660 -o loop". Says "block device required". Since I can mount the FAT partition, I tried making /dev/archiso a symbolic link to the ISO file, but this caused a kernel panic.
I have also tried to avoid this problem. Copied the contents of the ISO to a subdirectory on the FAT partition, but haven't figured out how to proceed from there. I suppose I should make a symbolic link to the files, but from where? Also, how do I get the installation script to skip the finding of the CD?
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Hi,
do you now have windows or linux installed?
If you have Linux, then you can try this: Installing from Arch-CD without having to burn it on a CD-Rom http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fas … nux_System
Maybe these Grub-entrys (hd0,3)/archiso/boot/vmlinuz ... etc also work with Grub4DOS.
But you also can install it directly without having the install-iso: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … ting_Linux
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Yes, the laptop has working installations of Windows 98 and Zenwalk Linux 4.8.
Space is very tight on that 3.2G hard drive. Creating an extra partition, as suggested in the first link, means destroying something to make room. I'd rather not. When I installed Zenwalk Linux, I shrunk the Windows partition as much as the partition resizer could, which depended on where the "unmovable" system files were. This resulted in 1.8G of space, where I put a small swap partition and Zenwalk Linux, and about 600M of free space on the FAT partition. Zenwalk Linux nearly fills the 1.7G-- no room there for ISOs. I use the 600M of free space on the FAT partition for ISO files or whatever is needed to do an installation.
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Got it to boot the ISO image! When it drops to "ramfs$" I did this:
mkdir /tmphdd
mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /tmphdd
mknod /dev/loop3 b 7 3
losetup /dev/loop3 /tmphdd/archi586.iso
ln -s /dev/loop3 /dev/archiso
exit
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