Normally, people burn a bootable cd, boot the cd, and install from there.

If you have no cd drive, you might be able to install grub and frugal boot the iso from hd.

I do not know which of these instructions applies anymore-

http://www.slitaz.org/en/doc/

The installer expects the kernel and the initrd file in the /boot dir of a mounted CDrom.
To 'trick' the installer just create a 'fake' /boot dir in the place where a cdrom would be mounted an of you go.

Therefore, on your USB-Stick:
  mkdir /media/cdrom/boot

Link you kernel into the fake cdrom dir
  ln /boot/bzImage /media/cdrom/boot/bzImage
or
  ln /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.6-slitaz /media/cdrom/boot/bzImage
whichever file you have in /boot/

Link your initrd image into the fake cdrom dir
  ln /boot/rootfs.gz /media/cdrom/rootfs.gz

Start the installation and have fun!!

Oldguy, that is a good tip but can the installer source and target be the same partition like that or does the flash need 2 partitions?

The 'installer' will mount the target partition to /mnt/target,
then mount the cdrom or link /home/boot to /media/cdrom/boot
and fail if no rootfs file is found in /media/cdrom/boot/

I haven't played around with a USB-Stick yet, but it seems that there is no rootfs file on that stick.

robro, what do you get when you use the following command as root in a terminal session while booted from the stick?
  find / -iname '*rootfs*'

Thanks for the help everyone :)

I will try your suggestions and post back the results some time today.

@robro, are you using the stable iso or the cooking iso?

I am assuming by 'extracted it on a 8gb usb flash drive' you mean you have a bootable flash drive (LiveUSB). If you are using the stable iso (the cooking iso does not have this issue, it automatically uses the LiveUSB to find what it needs), it insists on a cd drive even when you are using a LiveUSB, so as a workaround you can do the following:

- Copy the iso to your flash drive.
- Boot your system through the flash drive
- Then as root:

# mount -o loop slitaz-3.0.iso /media/cdrom

This will mount the iso as a folder at /media/cdrom. It has to be /media/cdrom else it won't work. Then run the slitaz-installer. It should work fine.

Well I was finally able to get it installed :)
but now whenever I boot up, it gives me some error that it wasn't able to mount something (sorry I don't know the exact error, it has been awhile since I booted it up) I might try the cooking version but does it have any "big" problems with it?

When you install to flash drive to stop the rootfs mount error:

Add

rootdelay=8

to kernel bootcode of /boot/grub/menu.lst

Cooking will have this same problem.

WARNING !!!!

The http://www.slitaz.org/ Quick Download Slitaz Cooking has obsolete kernel-2.6.34 without any driver support.

If you can boot into cooking you can't install any driver modules until you upgrade to linux kernel-2.6.37 , you may have to edit your boot loader so you boot into the upgraded kernel instead of the old kernel.

For a user with no previous experience with slitaz this can be a "BIG" problem.