Home server, part 4, installing the OS

For want of a cable, my home file server wasn't coming along very well, but today I hooked up the 2.5" IDE to PATA converter cable from Maplin with the hard drive from the disassembled Viglen MPC-L:


The Viglen was really easy to disassemble by the way. Two screws on the back hold on the backplate, and then the entire motherboard/hard disk assembly slides straight out. Another three screws let you remove the hard drive.

I settled on relatively simple route to install CentOS. I used Red Hat's KVM virtualization to run a VM, attaching the physical hard drive and the (virtual) CentOS DVD ISO. It sounds complicated, but all you need is this virt-install command line to do it (the host is Fedora 10):

virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
  -n centos5 -r 512 \
  -v --accelerate \
  -c /root/CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-DVD.iso \
  -f /dev/sde \
  --vnc --vncport=5900

(Adjust the path to the CentOS DVD ISO, and the physical hard drive device as appropriate).

CentOS 5.2 installed in about 15 minutes: