Installing SUSE without a CD-ROM
To install SUSE without a CD-ROM all you need is a USB Drive and the ISO. Grab the ISO and mount it:
mount -o loop /data/operatingsystems/openSUSE\ 10.3\ i386.iso /mnt/temp
now mount your thumb drive, If you don’t know what device your thumb drive is you can run:
dmesg
You’ll see something like:
usb-storage: device found at 5
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 1994752 512-byte hardware sectors (1021 MB)
So, my thumb drive is /dev/sdb:
mount /dev/sdb /mnt/thumbdrive
and then copy the files from boot/<arch>/loader to your USB Drive. Then move isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg
cp /mnt/temp/boot/i386/loader/ * /mnt/thumbdrive
mv /mnt/thumbdrive/isolinux.cfg /mnt/thumbdrive/syslinux.cfg
and then unmount your USB drive and run syslinux on it.
umount /mnt/thumbdrive
syslinux /dev/sdb
and then you will be able to boot off of your thumb drive and launch the SUSE installer and install from NFS, FTP, CIFS, or your local harddrive. One caveat of this method is that it will now try to install grub onto your thumb drive, so after it boots up the base system into memory, unplug your drive.
This does still change the boot order in which grub detects its drives from. So (hd0,0) is actually going to be your thumb drive, not your first disk. So on your first boot you will have to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst and point it to the right disk.
