On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 05:52:50PM -0500, David wrote:

That is discouraging news.

On the other hand, I've done USB installs of other distros that worked just fine. But those weren't set up with unetbootin. You could probably get away with, say, putting System Rescue Disk on a USB key, using that to boot and to put a partition on your hard drive, downloading a CentOS iso to the partition, mounting it as a loopback, chrooting into it, and seeing where you could go from there. Totally untested for CentOS, but something like that should work.

Or if you have a Windows box to set up from, I've found other recipes from this site useful in the past:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/usb-centos-5-live-install-via-windows/

Whit

I actually did follow this as the manual attempt at getting it to work; unsuccessfully. I probably should have clarified it better in my original email.

The USB boots, I get the install menu, the USB drivers, etc. are installed and then I am prompted for the location of the iso. Once I select the location and then the actual iso, the install aborts.

David

On 07/23/2010 04:25 AM, John Doe wrote:

From: Daviddavid@adurotec.com

...

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).

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey Either you can do most of it "manualy" (and learn a few things), or you use others scripts/programs (seeAlternatives at the bottom)...

JD

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CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

John Doe wrote:

From: David david@adurotec.com

...

The USB boots, I get the install menu, the USB drivers, etc. are installed and then I am prompted for the location of the iso. Once I select the location and then the actual iso, the install aborts.

Is there an error message before it "aborts"? I use a kickstrat so I am not sure but, I think you should not be prompted for the iso location... Did you add "method=hd:sda2:/centos" in syslinux.cfg? It specifies the location of the ISO image(s). If you are in a hurry, use the alternative methods (see Alternatives at the bottom of th wiki page)...

I'd say the wiki is useless, or far too elaborate. I think I posted my recipe here when I got it working, a few months ago. If anyone likes, I can repost it.

mark

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.

mark