Mini ISO hard drive install: can't find source!

Hello all. I’m quite confused about the process of installing the openSUSE 11 Gnome i386 cd onto a bootable SDHC card on my eeepc. I’ve approximately followed the “2 USB stick” instructions (I don’t have an optical drive) here

OpenSUSE on the EeePC - openSUSE

to no avail. Unfortunately, they refer to an older version (10.3), and I don’t have a functional openSUSE system (though I do have Ubuntu working on the eee, and Fedora on my other system). If anyone can piece together what I’m doing wrong, I’d be most grateful.

Process:

Create bootable USB from 10.3 mini ISO using unetbootin.

Create other “source” USB using live Gnome 11 i386 ISO.

Boot from first, installer runs, complains about not being able to find repo, drops to manual setup. Select “start installation”, “Hard disk”, then enter sdc1,d1,e1, /dev/ same, and for the path /, /openSUSE-11.0-read-only-i686-2.7.0.iso, and so forth, but getting “No repository found” for everything.

Without a command prompt, I really don’t know how to work out which disk is which (system information in the installer shows no hard disks or CD-ROMS). I don’t know whether the version mismatch is preventing it working, and I don’t even know what path I’m supposed to type once I’ve found it. :frowning:

Any help whatsoever received gratefully. Mike.

I have absolutely no experience with what you are trying to do, so my post should be taken with an enormous grain of salt . . . I did read the EeePC article, noting the section on 11.0 and the ref’d note about upgrading using zypper.

It is possible that your syntax is not right in order for the repo to be found or the media is incorrect; I just don’t know. But a relevant point might be that the package management was fundamentally changed from 10.3 to 11.0, which is why the note re zypper. It may very well be that you need to use matching versions of the mini-iso and the live-CD.

Sorry I can’t offer more.

Don’t apologise! :slight_smile: Thanks for the response. I take your point, the question as posed is pretty darn vague - I guess I was hoping I’d happen across somebody who’s followed the process already. I might have better luck on the eee forum. Still, I have made a breakthrough; I’ve discovered that in the initial menu after booting the mini iso (the one that I can only assume is grub in which you can choose ‘default’, ‘linux’, ‘memtest’ etc) I can hit escape and drop to some kind of command prompt. I’m away from my eee right now, but I’m pretty sure it says “Boot:” or similar. Attempts to ‘cd’ or ‘find’ a la bash or grub didn’t yield any success, and it didn’t occur to me to try dmesg or anything. Does anyone know what this prompt is, or how I can use it to find out where my disks are?

Thanks.

Just found this link…

Installation using images - openSUSE

…looks promising. I’ll report back any progress after experiments.

The menu is a message splash similar to what is used with grub, but actually it’s the front-end to linuxrc which is the underlying shell that calls the installation kernel. There are a lot of things you can do with linuxrc; there’s a wiki article. I haven’t used the mini-iso but with the standard installation, there are a lot of kernel arguments that can be passed to the kernel thru linuxrc using the Boot Options field on the splash screen or from that boot line behind it which you saw. In the standard installation, again can’t say for the mini-iso, in addition to the boot arguments once into the installation framebuffer you can abort out of it and drop into the linuxrc shell which has a whole host of options, e.g., looking at the hardware that’s been detected and modules loaded, scanning the entire list of available modules, specifying alternative methods of installation like ftp or http or nfs or local disk, etc.; it’s very powerful.

Good luck.

Hey mingus. Just a note to say thanks for the tips - I ended up giving up and taking the cowards way out :slight_smile: Putting a suse installation on a spare bit of HDD on my desktop, and gonna try to make a live USB from there.

Thanks anyway - you do a sterling job on these forums, and I only hope you learn as much new stuff as you put in :slight_smile:

[doffs hat]

@Confuseling -

Thanks very much for the kind words. :slight_smile:

Solution found - doesn’t involve the mini.iso (which appears perhaps to be deprecated, whether I was using it right or not), but does the job required. rotfl!

EeeUser ASUS Eee PC Forum / openSUSE onto SDHC without CD drive -> STUCK!

Terrific! And thanks for the link.

(Not positive, but I think the Net iso (~75MB) may have replaced the mini-iso.)