I often need to install Fedora/Redhat Enterprise Linux releases on a couple of machines due to my work. So its not feasible to write CD/DVD for each distro release as I will be wasting CD/DVDs as well as number of CD/DVDs keep on piling up. And in most of the cases the system already has Linux installed.

I mount the ISO image and copy the vmlinuz and initrd files from the path isolinux/vmlinuz and isolinux/initrd to the boot partition of the system where you want to install new distro. Add an entry in the boot loader with the newly copied vmlinux and initrd and append “askmethod” kernel parameter

For example, grub.conf would look like:

title Fedora_Install root (hd0,1) kernel /vmlinuz ro root=LABEL=/ askmethod initrd /initrd

Restart the system and select “Fedora_Install” to start Fedora Installation.

If you have the ISO image in the local disk itself, select Local Harddriver option and give the path where the ISO file is stored. If the ISO is present in some other remote systems, you may need to configure either HTTP/FTP server or configure NFS mount point in that remote system and select HTTP or FTP or NFS accordingly in the setup. Now the installation continues.

If the machine does not have Linux installed and if you don’t want to burn a DVD, you can try burning the boot.iso file (present in images/boot.iso) in to a CD and then boot from the CD and pass askmethod kernel parameter and follow the same procedure to select the installation media source.

Happy installing!