I have copied & extracted the contents of the 11.1 RC1 ISO to an external USB drive. The SuSE installer sees the drive however when I attempt to point to installer there to begin I’m told it can’t find the files. Is there a HowTo somewhere that walks users through hard disk based installs?
Installation without CD - openSUSE
I recommend putting the iso on it’s own partition & then download initrd & vmlinuz (or the whole /boot folder) that match the version – from the repo. Then modifying your Grub menu.lst to include:
title Install SUSE
root (hd0,0) <-- your's will be different
kernel /boot/inst-linux <--use the real /path/ filename
initrd /boot/inst-initrd <--use the real /path/ filename
If you are installing to a new, clean machine, then you would have to install Grub or use a boot disk.
Edit: Afterthought, you could also use a Grub LiveCD and install Grub either to a separate boot partition or the separate iso partition & go from there.
Have fun