This method of installing Fedora doesn’t require CD/DVD drive or USB Flash disks. But it requires the system to have a working Linux installed with GRUB as boot loader. You need to store the downloaded DVD .iso file in a partition which will not be overwritten during installation process.

  1. Move DVD image to a separate partition
  2. Mount DVD image and copy Linux bootable files to /boot and Create a GRUB entry for installation.
  3. Reboot the system and select the new GRUB boot entry to start installation

The following is the list of usable partitions in my Linux system. There is a separate EXT3 partition /dev/sda6 which is mounted in /disk1 directory. This directory can be used to keep Fedora installation DVD . iso image. In this example, I am trying to install Fedora 10 on an existing Fedora 9 partition. It is done in three steps.

[root@techpulp ~]# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              16G   12G    4G  67% /
/dev/sda1              80M   16M   64M  20% /boot
/dev/sda5               8G  1.2G  6.8G  15% /home
/dev/sda6             20G    10G   10G  50% /disk1
[root@techpulp ~]#

Now move the downloaded DVD image to /disk1 partition. Then mount the DVD .iso image using loop back device.

[root@techpulp ~]# mv Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /disk1
[root@techpulp ~]# mount /disk1/Fedora-10-i386-DVD.iso /mnt -o ro,loop
[root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/isolinux/initrd.img /boot/initrd.img.fc10
[root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/isolinux/vmlinuz /boot/vmlinuz.fc10

The Fedora 10 installer requires install.img to be present in images/ directory relative to the DVD iso image.

[root@techpulp ~]# mkdir /disk1/images
[root@techpulp ~]# cp /mnt/images/install.img /disk1/images/

Now add an entry GRUB configuration file (/boot/grub/grub.conf) for the Fedora 10 installation.

title Fedora 10 Installer
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz.fc10
    initrd /initrd.img.fc10

Now you are all set for installation so just reboot the system. At the GRUB prompt, select “Fedora 10 Installer” which will take you to Fedora 10 installation. During the installation, select “Install from hard disk” option and /dev/sda6 as installation source because that’s where DVD .iso image is present in this example.