HOW TO: Installation to Hard Drive

I have been wanting to install PelicanHPC to my hard drive rather than boot from CD, so here is a guide. Please note that this just does the same thing as the CD does when running PelicanHPC (such as, you cannot save stuff unless you mount a file system, etc), so far, although I am working on better things and will post updates as I go along. Just figuring this out took me a long time

1. Get the PelicanHPC image from its website, or if its already burnt on a CD, get it out of there with your favorite CD burning program.

2. Create a partition on your computer using GParted - I did it by getting a GParted Live CD, booting my computer from it, and resizing an existing partition, and then formatted the new partition as EXT3

3. Next, go back to your regular old linux distribution, and download "Universal Netboot Installer" - http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

4. Double click the downloaded file, it may ask you for root password, and then: Select the "Diskimage" option, and browse or enter the location of your PelicanHPC iso as you created in step 1, and also, check the "Show all drives" box, and then select the partition you created in step 2 (be very careful here). I have attached a screenshot at the end.

5. Press OK and wait for it to finish

6. Now, open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst for editing as root

7. Append this at the end (OF COURSE, DON'T FORGET TO CHANGE THE SDA11 TO WHATEVER YOUR PARTITION, AS WELL AS THE (HD0,10) TO WHATEVER YOUR PARTITION IS WHERE YOU DID ALL THE PREVIOUS STEPS OF INSTALLATION):
title pelican (on /dev/sda11)
root (hd0,10)
kernel (hd0,10)/ubnkern boot=live ramdisk_size=200000 hostname=pelican union=aufs root=/dev/sda11
initrd (hd0,10)/ubninit
savedefault
boot

8. Done, now reboot, and select "pelican" from the boot menu.

Please note that since I am quite new to linux, I figured this out after lots of trials and errors, formatting one of my computers hard drive, breaking another's grub, and other hurdles, so if anyone can look over this technique and verify it, I'll be glad. This works well for me now.

Boring legal blurb : DISCLAIMER: Do this at your own risk! I have tried many arcane how-to guides for cool stuff, but ended up formatting my data when trying a few of them, and of course, blamed myself (unlike those people who hold the authors responsible for their inexperience, when its just plain their fault), and agreeably learnt a lot along the way. So just have fun, and refer any questions or comments to me as usual.

Good luck

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Mukarram Ahmad
Mukarram Ahmad's Homepage
Email me at: mukarram91@gmail.com
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