installing Redhat 7.1

Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2001, at 05:15PM by Eric Richardson

So the other day I decided to finally send my many year old Redhat 5.1 install back to the bitbucket and install fresh. This would leave me a new copy of Redhat 7.1, and no more dependancy woes every time I tried to make an upgrade. Unfortunately, things for me are never that easy.

First off came figuring out how to archive the data I need to keep. My home directory peaks at about 1.3gb, so it really isn't just a matter of dumping it off to disk or anything. It took me a while, but I finally got everything archived off to a partition I'm not going to reformat.

Next came the matter of how to actually install. My cd burner is broken, so i can't just burn from iso images... No, that would be far too easy. So I figure I'll just make a boot floppy and install of files on the machine. Easy enough.

Then my floppy drive doesn't want to work. It sounds awful, and complains a lot about bad sectors (on many different floppies). Add that to my machine not wanting to boot from a SCSI cdrom and my IDE cdrom not functioning right when presented with a bootable cd, and I've got issues.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to loop mount the boot.img and install the kernel into LILO so that I can boot floopy-less. I have no clue if it will actually work.