Linux Distribution: Fedora Core 5
Problem: No DVD-R(or W) drive and a loss of CD-R availibility
Description:
I recently downloaded a Live-CD of a Linux Distro that was used to help get me back on my wireless network. I want to mount a DVD or multiple CD images onto a extra hard drive I have (3.43 GB, ATA 66) and want to mount it onto it. But unfortunately, I searched the Internet for answers and got nata, nothing, zip, zero on the topic. I currently don't have any money to go and get new CD-R(or W)'s or get a DVD-+R and DVD-+R's. How would I mount the image so it boots from the hard drive and installs on another hard drive (the setup should let me do this)?
Secondly, while I'm on the subject, how do I mount the flash drive image (diskboot.img in images) onto my flash drive? Can I boot the installation on the flash drive and let a network share on a Windows 2003 server with the image availiable install it on the remote computer?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean but here goes...

On Linux you can mount ISOs or images of other storage devices like this:

[code:1:51965ebcbb]

mkdir /dvd0
mount /home/username/FC-5-x86_64-DVD.iso /dvd0 -o loop

# You can then access the contents of the DVD

mkdir /cd0

mount /home/username/some_CD_image.iso /cd0 -o loop

# mount a CD ISO image

mkdir /floppy0

mount /home/username/floppy_disk_image.img /floppy0 -o loop

# of course the ISO or raw disk image you are mounting must have a proper and supported filesystem on it like ISO9660, UFS, ext2/3, XFS, NTFS, vfat, etc

[/code:1:51965ebcbb]

You can use QEMU to create emulated machines in which you can install and run other operating systems

http://qemu.org/ossupport.html

[code:1:51965ebcbb]
qemu -boot c -cdrom cdrom_image.iso -hda hard_drive_image.img

# or

qemu -boot d -cdrom KNOPPIX_V4.0.2DVD-2005-09-23-EN.iso

# etc

[/code:1:51965ebcbb]

VMWare is also giving away one of their server products for free

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

You can mount a CD or DVD image locally the following way:

0. I assume that your 3.43GB HDD is already mounted, formatted, and partitioned. Otherwise you need to attach the drive, boot the computer, and then run a program like gparted to detect, partition, format, and mount it somewhere in the file system.) Let's say that this hard drive is mounted as /local2 in this example. You also need to verify that the DVD image is smaller than the total available free space on the HDD is more than the size of the image.

1. Now open up a terminal and cd to the place where your images are. Make a folder called image in that folder on your large HDD- not on the 3.43GB HDD. Issue the following command:

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 ./name-of-image.iso ./image

If there are no error messages, go look in the folder named image. You should see stuff in there if ti went okay. If it didn't, then type "man mount" less the quotes into the terminal.

2. If the image is mounted, then copy the files in image over from image to local2.

3. Restart your computer and go into BIOS. Set the 3.43GB HDD to boot ahead of the other one and you should be good to go.

I have done stuff like this to install without burning CDs before. In fact, I did pretty much the same thing as I suggested here to mount my SuSE DVD so that I would never have to insert it to install new programs.

I currently have no working Linux machine working. I only have Windows workstations and servers. But I will try and get one up, and when I do, I'll come back to this page. Plus, I know a school who is having a problem with Linux in the tech classroom. I thank you for all your help.

Yeah, you do have to have a Linux machine up and running to do what we said. I don't know of any way to use Windows to mount a CD image at all. Windows was not designed to do things like that- you use official install media to install Windows. And Windows CD image is most likely a crack* and MS would certainly not make it easy to install from one! I think part of the reason that there is no Unix-esque "mount" command is that disk volumes are all plug and play and network drives are handled via GUI and the "net use" command. You can't mount a CD image as the handling of those would be done by a burning program and there is also no included command to take anything and dump it to an image like the dd command in UNIX does.

*Except for Windows betas. Those I know are distributed via ISO images.

I would recommend looking at this:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedo [...] de-en/fc5/

or this:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedo [...] de-en/fc4/

While these are Fedora Core specific the basic installation process is very similar for all distributions.


You can download Linux ISOs here:

http://mirrors.kernel.org/


Please advise the school to post here or PM me and other Linux geeks and myself will help them resolve any problems they might have.

:-D

There is an unsupported tool which allows you to mount ISOs under windoze.

You can download it here:

http://download.microsoft.com/down [...] nel_21.exe

Your mileage will vary.


I would recommend this tool for burning ISOs and creating ISO images:

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm


MSDN distributes ISOs on DVD which can be recorded to CD / DVD or mounted under the OS so you can install things without an optical drive.


Linux has all these capabilities and a lot more :-D

Linux Live CDs and DVDs such as Knoppix can run entirely from an optical drive without a hard drive.

You can get Knoppix here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/dist/knoppix/

If you use an installable Linux distribution such as Fedora Core, CentOS, SuSE, etc once you install the system you do not need an optical drive any more.

You can install Linux using FTP, NFS, HTTP, Samba, floppy, install images on hard drive, etc however that can be challenging.

Installing from DVD is currently the easiest way.

You would simply need to download an ISO like this one:

http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/c [...] 86-DVD.iso

and record it to DVD.

Interesting. I did not know of an ISO mounting tool under Windows. I generally will do one of two things to avoid using disks to install Linux. Both involve the use of the netinstall 65MB CD image that has been extracted to a USB stick to boot the computer with.

1. Mount and extract the install disk's contents to a folder on the local hard drive. Specify this as the "local" installation source. This only works if I don't reformat that partition or disk.

2. If I need to partition, I specify the installation source as NFS and mount the image on my other computer and make that folder available via NFS. This is much slower than the above method as the slower computer has only a 100Mbps NIC, which limits the transfer rate to about 11MB/sec and I can pull more than that from a DVD and a *lot* more from my hard drive (the 250GB gives me about 62MB/sec and the Raptor about 72MB/sec.)

You can always boot from the rescue CD or rescue image from USB, partition the drive, format as ext3 and wget the install images onto the ext3 FS, then use the netinstall disk to boot and install using the images already on the FS.

You could also use crazy kexec magic ;-)

:-D