[conspire] need assistance installing Fedora-10 on laptop from ISO on external hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> I mean when I boot my laptop or desktop, how do I get to the "boot:" prompt?

What I really mean is:  the "boot:" prompt provided by _what_?

I infer that you're talking about the "boot:" prompt furnishable by a
bootloader, e.g., by some instance of GRUB, lilo, syslinux, etc.  You
didn't specify _why_ you want to be able to get to that prompt, nor 
what the bootloader is -- but it's indeed a really good idea to know on
any computer, regardless of operating system.

I'm guessing that you referring to the prompt available, at the end of
Power-On Self-Test, from an instance of GRUB that's installed on your
laptop's internal hard drive.

In that case, pressing Esc should un-suppress GRUB's screens if they've
been concealed using the "hiddenmenu" directive in /boot/grub/grub.conf .
See:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/ref-guide/s1-grub-configfile.html


> I have firewire cable from my desktop computer to a 400G external drive. I
> have another firewire cable from the 400G external drive to another external
> drive. The only way I could get my laptop to see the 400G external drive was
> to plug a firewire cable from my laptop to the other external drive. My
> laptop could then see and access the 400G drive but the laptop could not see
> nor access the other external drive.

Yes, I get that.  I was just saying that I've never had occasion to 
rely on such a chain, and so you're out of my personal area of
experience, though to the best of my understanding it's _supposed_ to
work.