Sunday, November 19, 2006

Creating a SuSE installation boot CD

Suppose you have a copy of the SuSE 10.0 DVD, but you don't actually have a DVD player on your target computer. Here is a way to work around that:

Requisites:
- target computer must have a CD player and a BIOS that supports booting from CD
- target computer must have some means to get to the installation files, preferably these are put on a not-in-the-way partition on the target computer (for example on the second harddisk)
- a (unix) computer with package mkisofs installed
- some way to burn an iso image to CD

Steps:
- cd to installfolder/boot, where installfolder is the root of the installation source
- execute

mkisofs -R -b loader/isolinux.bin -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o suse10-installation.iso loader

- burn the result to a CD
- make sure the target computer has a means to get to the installation source
- let the target computer boot from the CD

When you are in the installation program you can do a ' back' to get in the installation program's menu. From there you can configure an alternate installation source.

Note that if you choose to install from a harddisk partition you should NOT format it, and you should NOT try to mount that partition during the installation. If you want you can mount the partition after the installation.

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