On 4/7/2011 8:14 AM, Markus Falb wrote:
I thought I did that a long time ago. Put the small boot.img file that is in the /images on the CD or DVD isos on a USB drive (you can use a loopback mount to get it if you can't find a place to download it separately), boot from it, pick nfs as the install method, and point it to the directory containing the CD iso images that you have under an NFS export on another box.
...
But when I said "simple" I really meant "following official methods and instructions given by Them, the CentOS powers-that-be".
I assume that the lack of a CD drive on the HP micro-server is a sign of things to come, so I would hope there would be an official method of installing CentOS on such a machine.
I think what Les suggested is one official supported method as outlined in the Installation Guide. How "official" do you want it ?
Here's the prompt you'll see and what it means:
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html-single/Ins...
I prefer PXE, but thats also not "simple", and not possible in every environment, colocations for instance.
There is one quirk about USB booting that I forgot: it is likely to confuse the installer's concept of disk names and where to install grub. I do nfs installs all the time because it is quicker/easier than swapping CDs in machines that don't have a DVD drive, but I normally burn the first disk and use 'linux askmethod' at the boot prompt. But, if grub isn't automatically installed right automatically, you can get into a shell with ctl-alt-F-something (F2 or F4, I think) and fix it before rebooting, or you should be able to boot even the boot.img into rescue mode - you just have to point it at the media again.