Howto: Install PCLinuxOS without a CD, or "poor man's install"

[exexpat]

I documented how to create a virtual liveCD on a separate partition of your internal hard drive so you can boot to it and/or install from there instead of wasting CDs every time you want to test drive a new release or distro.  This is also referred to as "poor man's install."  I thought others here might like to know so here's the link on my technical blog.

Install GNU/Linux without a CD, using your internal hard drive

I also documented a way to manually create a PCLinuxOS liveUSB or live external hard drive.

Install GNU/Linux without a CD, using a liveUSB or external hard drive

Hope those are helpful!

EDIT by davecs: The first link was wrongly labelled so it looked the same as the second!

EDIT by exexpat: Sheez, I must've been really tired when I posted this. Sorry everybody!    Anyway, hope you enjoy the tutorials!

[Was_Just19]

Your links are malformed
 

[pupthai]

Fixed the first but the second one was not found.  I had to remove a %22 on the end and it worked.
http://g33kgrrl.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/make-a-gnu-linux-liveusb/   

[Neal ManBear]

Both links lead to the same page. Oops! My mistake.

[exexpat]

Your links are malformed
 

Oooooooops!  Darn it, the one time I forget to double-check!

...sorry....  

[lmart]

will read your 2 articles

will your method work for the following laptop environment?
    no internal floppy
        laptop will boot from an external usb floppy
    internal cdrom does not work
        laptop will not boot from an external usb cdrom or dvdrom
    no native bios support for usb booting
    hdd boots to grub4dos
        hdd wiped clean
        then successfully installed grub4dos boot code to mbr
        note: using grub4dos because couldn't figure out how to get syslinux working
        note: open to any ideas you may have

goal:  (1) 500MB Win98SE DOS partition, (2) partition with pclinuxos-lxde-2009.4

need:  specific, howto, with step by step instructions if your method works

[kraken]

The installation works for me. The problem I have is, when I have more than one PCLinuxOS editions (Gnome, Xfce, KDE) installed on different partitions, no matter which one I choose to boot, the initrd always load only one of them. Look like the initrd searches the harddisk for the image to load, and pick the first one it can find, rather than using the parameters in grub (root=, bootfrom=).
Is there other parameters that can use ?

[Was_Just19]

The installation works for me. The problem I have is, when I have more than one PCLinuxOS editions (Gnome, Xfce, KDE) installed on different partitions, no matter which one I choose to boot, the initrd always load only one of them. Look like the initrd searches the harddisk for the image to load, and pick the first one it can find, rather than using the parameters in grub (root=, bootfrom=).
Is there other parameters that can use ?

Have a read through this ...  it may give you some ideas ....
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,62202.0.html

particularly the second post.

regards.

[levinejohn]

The above mentioned installation method works for me.

[AdamR]

I've installed PCLinuxOS from hard disk, using only three files: livecd.squashfs, /isolinux/vmlinuz and /isolinux/initrd. I put these files into my old /home partition, rebooted computer to grub4dos and started livecd.

without partitioning disk, burning cds, using pendrive

[Atle]

I've had great success using unetbootin to create a bootable usb memory stick. This also works with EFI