4.5. Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting
The installer may be booted using boot files placed on an
existing hard drive partition, either launched from another operating
system or by invoking a boot loader directly from the BIOS.
A full, “pure network” installation can be achieved using this
technique. This avoids all hassles of removable media, like finding
and burning CD images or struggling with too numerous and
unreliable floppy disks.
The installer cannot boot from files on an NTFS file system.
4.5.1. Hard disk installer booting using LILO or
GRUB
This section explains how to add to or even replace an existing linux
installation using either LILO or
GRUB.
At boot time, both bootloaders support loading in memory not
only the kernel, but also a disk image. This RAM disk can be used as
the root file-system by the kernel.
Copy the following files from the Debian archives to a
convenient location on your hard drive, for instance to
/boot/newinstall/.
Finally, to configure the bootloader proceed to
Section 5.1.2, “Booting from Linux Using LILO or
GRUB”.
