Kenneth Porter wrote:
On Friday, April 13, 2007 2:03 PM -0500 Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Is it possible to install directly from a DVD iso image downloaded to a USB external drive as a file on a FAT filesystem? That is, if I burn the boot.iso on a CD and boot it, is there any way to mount the USB drive and install from the DVD image file there (some target machines don't have a DVD drive).
This sounds like a "hard drive installation":
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/ch02s06.html
The only requirement is that the installer OS be able to find the USB drive where the ISO is located.
I actually recently attempted something similar with FC7t3, booting with the installer on my USB memory stick, and the DVD ISO on the SATA partition (sdb5) that I was going to target with the new OS. It hung loading RPM's and I never found anything written to sdb5, so I suspect the install got stuck in the disk cache. (While the installer was running, I couldn't see any mountpoint for sdb5 either, just the mountpoint for the location of the ISO image.)
I'm now planning to attempt something similar with Centos 5. I'll report back how that goes. (I'm still waiting for the torrent to finish.)
Check the Anaconda archive at RH, I think I saw an aside about something like this earlier today. I think one is supposed to be able to install _to_ USB disk. Presumably if the installer on the CD can find it for one purpose, it can find it for the other.
There's also a boot image for booting _from_ USB disk. Presumably that can find it;-)