[CentOS] cobbler installation of CentOS-5.5

[Mark Pryor]

--- On Fri, 4/1/11, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:

> From: Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] cobbler installation of CentOS-5.5
> To: centos at centos.org
> Date: Friday, April 1, 2011, 5:46 PM
> Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 
> > I'm trying to install CentOS-5.5 on my new HP
> micro-server,
> > which has no CD drive.
> > 
> > I've set up cobbler and cobbler-web on my old server,
> > and can access cobbler-web from my laptop.
> 
> Just to end the story.
> Having found the DVD ISO with the help of this newsgroup,
> I installed CentOS-5.5 on my HP micro-server
> using cobbler, with no trouble at all.
> 
> But I was surprised to find that this had deleted the
> partitioning
> which I had carefully installed with Fedora Live CD on a
> USB stick,
> and assigned the whole disk to LVM.
> 
> I looked on the web to see how I could modify ks.cfg
> to make a partition of my own choice,
> but decided after a brief study that life is too short
> to spend on the intricacies of kickstart.
> 
> So I have given up cobbler, and will try the netinstall CD
> next,
> installing it on a USB stick.
> If that doesn't work I shall put the CentOS Live CD on a
> stick,
> and install that on the hard disk.

If all you want to do is kick-off an install via USB stick, you want

http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.5/os/x86_64/images/diskboot.img

and use syslinux/memdisk to boot it on a vfat partition

------------- syslinux.cfg ------------
label c564
kernel memdisk
append initrd=/diskboot.img
--------- snip --------

you can dd the whole IMG to your stick, but its cleaner to collect such
images and reference them in syslinux.cfg.

To setup your stick to boot
#syslinux -s /dev/sda   (unmounted USB disk)

-- 
Mark