Assuming you have completed lab #4, your task is to use the spare disk space on your drive to install another OS, and to set up your drive to be able to boot to any OS (Win XP, current CentOS, and your new OS) using Grub. This must be a regular installation, not a virtual installation (e.g., with VMWare or equivalent). This is a common situation -- one OS might be the stable, regular OS, while the other might be a new, beta version that you want to test. A sysadmin may in fact want to have many OSes installed, perhaps at least one for every OS that must be supported for the organization. For an extreme case, take a look at the many OSes installed on one PowerBook.
The usual process of installing an OS is to reboot your machine using one or more boot floppies or CDs, and install from either a set of CDs, or remotely via FTP or HTTP, etc. The unusual aspect of this project is that you are not permitted to use a floppy or CD (or any other removable media, such as USB key chain).
Your task is to install a third OS on your removable drive for the sandbox lab machines, without using any other removable media such as floppy disk or CD-ROM. You may use any OS, other than Windows XP and not any version of CentOS or Fedora. Pretty much any Linux distribution will work, and probably Solaris and the *BSDs, too.
I recommend that you consider using a mirror site as the source for the OS (you'll probably be installing more than 1GB), and that you choose a mirror that is hosted by an educational institution, as Lehigh will have better connectivity (a mostly unused 100Mbps Internet2 link) to most US universities.
What you'll need to hand in by email to the cse265 account: an approximately two page description of the process that you followed. Include problems that you faced and how you solved or worked around them. Describe also the correct set of steps that you would follow if you (or someone else) were to do it again. Also tell me which OS (and version) you installed, and paste a copy of the final partition table for your drive. A successful installation with a well-written report will get full credit (that is, your writing will be assessed as well as what you write). Note that for this writeup, feel free to send me PDF (or even .doc files) as I will be printing them.
Finally, this is a non-trivial assignment. Installing an OS can be quite slow, and you may need to use resources (such as mirror sites, the Internet, etc.) that are not always dependable. It is highly unlikely that you will be able to complete it the day before it is due. Many of you will make mistakes along the way -- in some cases you may need even to start over by re-imaging your hard drive, re-doing the actions we did in lab, and re-start this project. So, I strongly suggest that you start early. One place to start will be to read the installation instructions for the OS that you plan to install.
The requirement to not create or use removable media is unusual but not totally out of the question -- many people administer dedicated machines that are hosted hundreds or thousands of miles away from the administrator.