How to install Arch from hard drive?

Hello
I have an old laptop - Pentium II 266 MHz, 128Mb RAM and I want to install Arch on it.
The problem is that there is no way to boot from this laptop -> floppy is broken, CD drive is not bootable, no available boot options from BIOS to boot from PXE or USB.
So, I found this link useful (but not enough).
I have done everything as described on the upper link, but on the final step 7 I don't know how to proceed.
What I have got is:
Arch installation CD is in the CD drive.
After loading vmlinuz26 and archiso.img (which is RAM Disk or initrd) it shows this message: "waiting 30 seconds for device /dev/disk/by-label/"
And another message: "ERROR: boot device didn't show up after 30 seconds" and after that it put me in the ramfs prompt.
I try this in ramfs prompt, but without success:
1. ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/archiso
2. exit (and try again)
What I want is to tell the installer that it must proceed with the installation files on my CD drive.
But how to do that?
If it is not possible, then how could I install Arch on this old laptop? Is there any other methods to try?
PS: There is Windows 2000 and Windows 98 installed on this laptop, but I want to install Arch on it. The whole hard drive is one partition.
Last edited by clovenhoof (2011-08-09 06:49:48)

Try either of the following:
* Add archisolabel=LABEL to the kernel line in menu.lst, where LABEL is the filesystem label of the partition where the ISO resides.
* Add archisodevice=/dev/sdaX to the kernel line in menu.lst, where sdaX should be replaced with the partition where the ISO resides.
[Edit]
Hmmm, sorry I think I was wrong. With the above, you need also extract the ISO, put the arch/ directory at the root of the partition.
Alternatively, you can put the ISO to the root of that partition, and add img_dev=/dev/sdaX and img_loop=foo-bar.iso. For details, see:
https://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git/tree/README
BUT even if it loads, I don't think you will be able to install Arch on the same partition since it's mounted readonly to /bootmnt, (unless, you explicitly add copytoram to the kernel line, in which case, everything is copied to RAM, but since the machine has got only 128MB of RAM, this is not gonna happen). So, you need to put the ISO (or the extracted squashfs images) to a different partition than your target installation partition...
There probably are other things I'm missing... Gotta say this sounds quite challenging.
[Edit2]
Bah! Try archisodevice=/dev/sr0 then!
Last edited by lolilolicon (2011-08-09 07:48:17)

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