Howto install openSuSE 11.3 from your hard drive or USB drive

Fast and easy way to install openSuSE system. Actually it took me less time for the preparation than if I would have burnt an installation DVD. The advantage for all netbook owners is obvious since there is no need of additional hardware. For all preparation I used my working system openSuSE 11.2 on my laptop and it could be done on every linux distribution out there.

Preparation

Download openSuSE 11.3 installation DVD matching your computer.

Create empty partition to accommodate the source ( at least 5 GB ) with Ext3 file system.

I created 9 GB partition on my hard drive with Ext3 fs using GParted which is /dev/sda9.

Now is time to prepare the installation source. Here is how:

# mkdir /mnt/dvd

# mkdir /SOURCE

# mount /path-to-iso-image/openSUSE-11.3-DVD-x86_64.iso /mnt/dvd -o loop

# mount /dev/sda9 /SOURCE

# cp -R -L /mnt/dvd/* /SOURCE

Installation source is ready on partition /dev/sda9 mounted as /SOURCE. In your file manager go to /SOURCE/boot/x86_64/loader and copy initrd and linux files from there.

Preparing the boot loader:

In my folder /boot I created subfolder /dvd, where I put the two files from above - initrd and linux. Then open /boot/grub/menu.lst in text editor and add the following section there

title Install OpenSuse DVD
root (hd0,5)
kernel (hd0,5)/boot/dvd/linux
initrd (hd0,5)/boot/dvd/initrd

Please, adjust the numbers to match your own configuration. And If you use other linux distribution use the paths accordingly.

Note: Exactly the same order applies if you want to use external USB drive for this installation

All done! Reboot and choose the newly created section.