From The Chakra Project - Wiki

This page should serve as a quick how-to on installing Chakra from a hard disk (rather than burning a CD or making a USB stick). You can use use this method if your CD drive is buggy or non-existent! Also, installation from the hard disk is much faster than using a CD. It's also (arguably) much cleaner than the method described on Arch Linux wiki (it involves a lot more fiddling with your partition tables)

Requirements

• Chakra ISO image (this how-to was tested with alpha2)
• An existing GNU/Linux installation (any Unix-like system would be okay) plus 2 empty partitions
• GRUB (theoretically, any boot manager that can boot a Linux kernel with an initrd is fine)

Partition Structure

This how-to assumes the following partition structure on your hard disk (but it can be easily applied to different structures):

• /dev/sda1 (mounted as /) : This is the partition with the existing GNU/Linux installation and has GRUB written to the MBR.
• /dev/sda2 (mounted as /media/sda2) : We will install Chakra on this partition.
• /dev/sda3 (ext3 formatted and mounted as /media/sda3) : We will copy Chakra installation files to this partition (Actually, I just used sda1, but if you want to keep it clean, use a different partition)

Let's Get to Work!

• Mount Chakra ISO to a local directory and copy files over to the root directory of sda3:

 # mkdir chakra
 # mount -o loop chakra-i686-090218-alpha2.iso chakra
 # cp -R chakra/* /media/sda3/

• Now let's add a grub entry to boot the installer. In /boot/grub/menu.lst, add the following entry at the end:

title           Install Chakra
root            (hd0,2)
kernel          /isolinux/vmlinuz26 quiet splash vga=791 lang=en nonfree=yes panic=5
initrd          /isolinux/larch.img

NOTE: If you have used a different partition other than sda3, then change (hd0,2) to the correct one! Also note that GRUB partition numbers start from 0 not 1. Adapt lang=en to your language, lang=de in my case. This is tested to work on nvidia graphics card, so leave nonfree=yes. More testing necessary for Intel and ATI cards.

• Profit! Or just reboot and select that entry from GRUB menu! Chakra should proceed to boot to a live KDE desktop.

IMPORTANT Don't use the Chakra installer to format the partition to which you copied the installation files (sda3 in this case.) Now that should be obvious enough, right?