Bowie Bailey wrote:
On 7/22/2010 6:09 PM, David wrote:
Has anyone successfully built a USB key for installing centos5.5 either manually or using a tool like unetbootin?
I am trying to create one using the 64bit install DVD iso and so far the USB either won't boot (unetbootin) or the installation aborts after I select the iso location on the USB key (manual).
I was able to successfully install CentOS 32-bit from an 8GB USB flash drive (4GB is not quite big enough, even for i386) created with this procedure:
Create a 10M DOS partition on the USB drive and make it active Create Linux partition using the rest of the drive mkfs -t vfat /dev/<USB DOS partition> mkfs /dev/<USB Linux partition> liveCD-iso-to-disk <boot.iso> /dev/<USB DOS partition> mount /dev/<USB Linux partition> /mnt rsync --progress <CentOS.iso> /mnt/You can get the boot.iso by loop-mounting the CentOS iso and pulling it out of the /os/i386/images directory, or grab it from one of the mirrors (the mirror links on the CentOS site link directly to the install isos, so you'll have to browse up a few directories and then go back down to find the images directory).
I used 'rsync' here because I hate having a copy process run for 10 minutes with no progress indication. :)
The only problem I found was that the install insisted on installing grub on the USB drive rather than the target hard drive. I finally had to skip the grub installation and install it by hand afterwards.
Yeah - that may be either an install thing, or an anaconda one. I hate that. I always have to reboot from the USB key, go to linux rescue, then chroot to /mnt/sysimage, and grub-install /dev/sda
Then I have to edit /boot/device.map, and hand-make an /boot/grub/grub.conf. I keep meaning to have one on the USB key, so I can just copy it after I do the grub install.
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