Hi, Toomas Tamm wrote on 2011-10-11 19:27:30 +0300 [Starting FAI off a running system]: > I have a host which has a very old version of Linux installed on the > hard disk. I also have a bootable USB stick which contains FAI and can > install a newer version of Debian on other hosts. The motherboard on > that old machine does not seem to be able to boot neither off the > network nor off that USB stick. > > Assuming I can mount the filesystem on the FAI USB stick under the > already-installed system, is it possible to start FAI and reinstall the > system? Any hints at how to do that?
you could do a 'dirinstall', but that would mean installing onto new partitions and keeping the old ones around (at least until the new system is running). What I do in similar cases is: * Copy the install kernel (e.g. /srv/tftp/fai/vmlinuz-install) and the corresponding initrd from the FAI server to the client. * Add an entry to the LILO or GRUB configuration to boot that kernel with the same command line arguments you would find in the file created by 'fai-chboot' for that host in /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg - I tend to name the entry "Fully Automatic Installation" :). You'd need to adapt this to using the USB stick as root rather than the $NFSROOT if that's what you want to use. * Reboot the host and select the new entry when convenient. * Hope the installation succeeds or aborts prior to task_partition :-). You can do much the same for a 'sysinfo' if you want to do a non-destructive test first. If the installation does fail before making the new system bootable, you're probably stuck to connecting a CDROM drive and booting a rescue system :-(. It *has* happened to me at least once (which was my fault, not FAI's), but mostly, it just works as intended. Hope that helps. Regards, Holger
