This is a description of how I installed Red Hat Linux (both 8 and 9) without floppy disks. It worked for me, so it may also work for you. (I've also seen it fail on another machine.) No guarantees, though.
I downloaded the ISO images needed for the installed into the root
directory of one of my partitions (for me, /mnt/c, which I
need to remember for the install is /dev/hda1). For
Red Hat 9, these are called shrike-i386-disc1.iso,
shrike-i386-disc2.iso, and
shrike-i386-disc3.iso, and checked the MD5 checksums
against the MD5SUMS file distributed with them, and checked the PGP
signature of the MD5SUMS file.
Since I like to have access to the ISO images after the install, I
made subdirectories of /mnt for them and added them to
/etc/fstab with the following lines:
/mnt/c/shrike-i386-disc1.iso /mnt/shrike/1 iso9660 loop=/dev/loop0,blocksize=1024,users,noauto,ro 0 0 /mnt/c/shrike-i386-disc2.iso /mnt/shrike/2 iso9660 loop=/dev/loop1,blocksize=1024,users,noauto,ro 0 0 /mnt/c/shrike-i386-disc3.iso /mnt/shrike/3 iso9660 loop=/dev/loop2,blocksize=1024,users,noauto,ro 0 0
Then came the fun part, which is to bootstrap the install without a
floppy. I used the following commands (I have a /mnt/tmp
directory for anything unusual that needs to be mounted) to mount the
boot disk and copy the kernel into /boot (being careful not
to overwrite anything that's already there):
# mount /mnt/shrike/1 # mount /mnt/shrike/1/images/boot.iso -o loop /mnt/tmp # cp /mnt/tmp/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/shrike-initrd.img # cp /mnt/tmp/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/shrike-vmlinuz # umount /mnt/tmp # umount /mnt/shrike/1
Then I edited /boot/grub/grub.conf so that I could boot
to the boot disk and start the install as if I were doing a normal hard
disk install of RedHat Linux, by adding the following entry:
title Shrike Boot Disk kernel /boot/shrike-vmlinuz initrd=/boot/shrike-initrd.img lang= devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=9216 initrd /boot/shrike-initrd.img
(Back to Linux, David Baron)