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Using a Downloaded .iso Image for System Upgrade

From ljones on Tue, 18 Jan 2000

Hello,

I have Red Hat 5.2 installed, and have successfully downloaded the .iso image for 6.1.

How do I use the image to upgrade?

Lawrence

Basically you have to burn that image onto a CDR or CDRW using 'cdrecord'

Then you can boot from the CD media and do your upgrade.

It would be nice if you could just mount the .iso image on a loopback block device and run the upgrade utility from that. However, I don't think you can do that. There's no problem with the mounting part, just use a command like:

mount -o loop /path/to/....iso /mnt/loop

... to mount the .iso file as a filesystem. The problem is that the installer/upgrader for Red Hat is set up to run from the initrd (initial RAM disk) or from the init process. I haven't torn it apart and looked that closely at it --- but it doesn't seem like you can just mount the image, or the CD and run the installer/upgrader. You have to boot from it.

[ Should be pretty easy to boot from one of its floppy images, then point to your loopback mounted drive location as a file source. You might have to mount it at /cdrom in order to convince the diskette to use it. -- Heather ]

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 50 February 2000

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