How to Install the Mageia Linux Operating System Without a DVD Drive

Just as floppy drives disappeared in the past, CD and DVD drives are now disappearing from computers. Nowadays, USB flash drives are used to transfer data, and they even come with a capacity of 256GB, which the average user won't fully use for everyday purposes, and so DVD drives are disappearing from computers. Netbooks in particular don't have DVD drives. When buying a new desktop, you can no longer connect an old DVD drive with an IDE interface. I ran into this problem myself.

How do you install Linux, in this case Mageia, on a new computer without a DVD drive?

PXE

One option is to use network booting, known by the abbreviation PXE.
Debian handles network booting and installation excellently. The distributor has prepared everything, so you just need to install the required services on Debian and unpack the archive with the files, which contain the network-bootable installation system.
Mageia also allows you to start the installation from the network. However, not everyone has network booting set up at home. Moreover, the most thoroughly tested method is the main installation method, so with the others there's a greater likelihood of running into some difficulties.
Personally, I ran into a problem on a new computer with a new MSI_B85-G43 motherboard, where the network card didn't work when installing Mageia 4 x86_64 from the network. Which is a pretty fundamental problem when you want to install from the network! Yet during the installation of the 32-bit version, the network card worked without any problems when installing from the network.
Another inconvenience when installing from the network is that the servers with the installation packages have slow transfer speeds, even if you're on a fast network. So unless you have a local mirror at home, the installation takes a very long time.

Booting from a USB drive

A suitable option is to create a bootable USB flash drive. Mageia has supported this for some time now, so you just need to use the dd program to copy the Mageia ISO image onto the USB flash drive. Then that USB flash drive becomes a bootable USB flash drive.

Combination

An improved combination can be booting an installation program that lets you start the installation from an ISO image stored on the disk. That way you don't need to erase the flash drive or have a network mirror of the distribution. For example, if you have a USB drive, you just need to copy the ISO images onto it and use PXE to boot the installation program, in which you then start the installation from the given ISO image.
This is also a good solution if you don't have a large enough USB flash drive to fit a DVD image on it and can't overwrite the whole USB drive.

detailed information about the ways of installing Mageia