A.2. Booting the installer
Prev | Appendix A. Installation Howto | Next

## A.2. Booting the installer

The debian-cd team provides builds of CD images using `debian-installer` on the Debian CD page. For more information on where to get CDs, see Section 4.1, “Official Debian GNU/Linux CD-ROM Sets”.

Some installation methods require other images than CD images. Section 4.2.1, “Where to Find Installation Images” explains how to find images on Debian mirrors.

The subsections below will give the details about which images you should get for each possible means of installation.

### A.2.1. CDROM

There are two different netinst CD images which can be used to install sarge with the `debian-installer`. These images are intended to boot from CD and install additional packages over a network, hence the name 'netinst'. The difference between the two images is that on the full netinst image the base packages are included, whereas you have to download these from the web if you are using the business card image. If you'd rather, you can get a full size CD image which will not need the network to install. You only need the first CD of the set.

Download whichever type you prefer and burn it to a CD.

### A.2.2. Booting from network

It's also possible to boot `debian-installer` completely from the net. The various methods to netboot depend on your architecture and netboot setup. The files in `netboot/` can be used to netboot `debian-installer`.

### A.2.3. Booting from hard disk

It's possible to boot the installer using no removable media, but just an existing hard disk, which can have a different OS on it. Download `hd-media/initrd.gz`, `hd-media/vmlinuz`, and a Debian CD image to the top-level directory of the hard disk. Make sure that the CD image has a filename ending in ".iso". Now it's just a matter of booting linux with the initrd.

Prev | Up | Next
A.1. Preliminaries | Home | A.3. Installation