Installing Fedora 16 from Hard Drive

Okay!

To start, this post will assume that:
- You are using the grub boot loader. That's it.

For reference, I use different partitions. My disk is partitioned in this manner:

Device Mount Point Size Description
/dev/sda1 /boot 4 GB Used to hold kernel and fs images.
/dev/sda2 ~320GB Extended partition labeled canister to hold logical devices
/dev/sda3 ~130GB ext4 filesystem
/dev/sda4 / ~90 GB Partition that holds Arch Linux, which I use as a fallback.


The sizes are probably off, irrelevant, I know.

Now, go download the Fedora 16 ISO image. *NOT* the LiveCD image, the entire install DVD.

After you have this, mount it:

# mkdir -v /mnt/iso
# mount Fedora-16-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/iso
# cd /mnt/iso


I might mention here that if you have your /boot on a separate partition as I do, you will need to ensure that it is not very small. I have mine at 4GB, the default size was 100Mb so I had to grow the partition to fit the Fedora vmlinuz image, which is ~128MB alone. You can check by typing df -h
You may not need 4GB. I will leave it up to you to do the math. If you have your entire installation on one partition, including /boot then I guess you don't have to worry.

ANYWAYS, carrying on.

Being in the mounted directory, you will see a folder named `isolinux`, cd into this directory.
Be sure that you have your boot partition mounted and copy these two files into boot, ensuring that you rename them so you don't overwrite anything that might be there already. If you do that, I LAUGH AT YOU BECAUSE YOU CLEARLY DIDN'T READ WHAT I JUST TOOK THE TIME TO WRITE.
Let that be a lesson because you can't undo it and you've just overwritten your working OS with an installation image. If that's okay with you, just reboot and it should boot right into the install. If not, HAHAHA.

Do this:

# cd isolinux
# cp vmlinuz /boot/f16install-vmlinuz
# cp initrd.img /boot/f16install-initrd.img


Now people would say that "oh, you should edit your grub configuration!", but you know what? I find it complicating and annoying to have to add it into your grub menu. Just boot it from your grub command line, which you can access by pressing 'c' at the grub menu:


grub> kernel=/f16install-vmlinuz
grub> initrd=/f16install-initrd.img
grub> boot


The second command might take a little bit to load the image, but it will. Don't be so impatient!

That's it. Enjoy.
Any problems aside from "I didn't read the instructions and I baleted my working operating system, WHAT DO?" I will be more than glad to help.