Bare-metal server provisioning systems typically decompress OS images into RAM before writing them to disk. When servers have insufficient RAM to hold the decompressed image (increasingly common as OS images grow due to AI/ML toolkits, GPU drivers, and firmware stacks), provisioning fails entirely. This paper presents a streaming installation technique that combines partial decompression for metadata extraction with pipeline-based disk writing, enabling OS installation on hosts where available RAM is less than the decompressed image size. The method decompresses only the first 30MB of a compressed image to extract the GPT partition table, calculates the target filesystem offset, then streams the full image through a kernel pipe buffer (64KB) directly to disk at the calculated offset, never storing the decompressed data in memory or on disk. Deployed across a production fleet of memory-constrained bare-metal servers, the technique achieves 100% provisioning success where the standard approach fails entirely.

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