Tips for installs on Laptops with no CD/DVD drives

[Saist]

Tips for installs on Laptops with no CD/DVD drives

Putting this in the tips and tricks thread to make it a little easier for myself to find.

Some time ago one of our users had a laptop that didn't have any native CD/DVD drive. The drive provided with the laptop was a Firewire (1394) drive and Mepis was unable to boot/install on the laptop.

The user also had another laptop that the Mepis install /would/ work on. So I suggested that the user take the hard-drive out of the laptop with no drive, put it in the laptop with a drive, run the Mepis Install, and then put the hard-drive back in the original laptop. Theoretically, Mepis should boot up and run on the new drive.

The trick worked.

So, what happens if you don't have another laptop on hand to do the install on. Well, thanks to a person who was having an issue with a Sager NP2885 tablet, there is an answer. Just for a quick reference, the Sagar NP2885 has no CD drive, and it also maps its drives to the IDE standard hda setting, unlike my infamous Clevo D900T that maps the drives to sda.

So, how to get around the boot problem? Off of Newegg I picked up a KINAMAX ADP-IDE23 Laptop 2.5" to Desktop 3.5" IDE Hard Drive Adapter Converter and used it to put the Sager's drive onto the IDE chain of another clients standard Desktop Via based Socket A motherboard. Installed Mepis onto the Via motherboard system, turned the system off, swapped the drive back into the Sager, and booted up into Mepis on the laptop.

Now, I did this particular test for one reason. The Via motherboard uses an AthlonXp processor... the Sager has a Pentium-M processor.

So, why does this work?

Here's why : Mepis does an auto-hardware check and looks for new devices everytime you turn the system on. This means that if you change a network card, graphics card, or other hardware device, Mepis should be able to account for it during the boot process.

So, if you do change a processor, or even a complete system architecture, Mepis should account for this during Boot.

There are some tips though to get this working properly.

#1 : Use the VESA option on the boot. This makes sure that no graphics driver is set when you go to swap hard-drives around. You can also run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg later to set the Intel driver (yes, I did snapshot a guide on doing that while working with the Sager), or use the Mepis Utilities to set an appropriate ATi or Nvidia driver later.

#2 : Use a resolution of 800*600. Just be on the safe side with this.


If you have a standard desktop computer that doesn't have a CD/Drive, you can do the swap with standard IDE drives as well.


*edit* corrected some grammar ans spelling...

[Acesabe]

Great tip Saist - a good idea to use this method - a good idea to disconnect as much hardware as possible when doing the install on the temporary host pc, where possible although in practice the kernel will just discover whats there when it boots and use what it finds...