Hello I am in Arch Kde and I want to switch to Fedora I have the iso but i dont have an usb. I previously tried but failed used ai not work then i abandoned it. But now i again want to install please help. I have an intel laptop with 8GB ram and 512 GB storage ssd I have dual booted Arch and Windows
See this thread where someone asked a similar question:
There are ways to attempt it, but it’s not officially supported.
It might well be easier just to get a USB drive - 4GB should be enough.
I assume you intend to remove the arch partitions and replace them with Fedora and leave Windows as-is.
You could, in theory, carve out some disk space from whatever you have spare, unpack the ISO into it, mess about with chroot, start up the installer, install Fedora over the top of Arch, boot into the newly installed Fedora, purge and reclaim the space for the Live ISO and hope nothing goes wrong and yiou make zero mistakes.
Or…
Just buy a 4GB USB drive - they are almost free. In addition, you then have a Live USB to assist in any rescue and recovery missions you might have to undertake.
there is another partition i intend to download but if i did the chroot way can it install i dont want to purge arch and i cant buy a usb
cant we add entry in grub or systemd-boot and install it and i dont want to delete arch there is other partition.
It goes something like that
Create a new fat32 file system and copy LiveOS/squashfs.img to it.
Copy boot/x86_64/loader/initrd and boot/x86_64/loader/linux to where the bootloader can find it and create a boot entry for that.
The boot arguments are similar to the one fond on the iso image
quiet rhgb root=live:CDLABEL=Fedora-WS-Live-44 rd.live.image rd.live.check
Replace the part CDLABEL=Fedora-WS-Live-44 rd.live.image wiht for example UUID=xxxx-xxxx where xxxx-xxxx is the uid of the file system where you copied the LiveOS directory and contents.
You may then possibly be able to boot the live system as if you booted from USB. It is quite a few years ago I tried that, so it is possible it dosn’t work anymore.
do i need to copy the entire contents
Probably not, but you have to get enough for the installer to execute.
strace will probably assist a great deal.
All the important contents are packed into LiveOS/squashfs.img which you can mount if you want to see its contents. The rest is just the grub2 stuff.
so i have to copy the contents the squashfs and boot file and some more replace the Label to uuid boot and install
The special initrd from the iso image is looking for a file named LiveOS/squashfs.img on the root partition you specify and it will then do whatever neccessary to bring up the system.
Thanks everyone how do i mark this topic as solution
There is a little checkbox below each answer, please mark the most helpful answer of another user as the solution - if that solution got you your installed system.