[CentOS] Help With Installation to USB Stick

Thu Dec 14 03:48:36 UTC 2006
Mark Rose <mrose77 at charter.net>

Recently, I was able to create a workable Centos 4.4 "Live USB" on my 1G Lexar Firefly pendrive using the steps in http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/usbdisk.html.  At the moment, it is doing its job, so I probably won't focus too much more on it. One thing that is annoying, although doesn't cause a problem is that on powerdown and reboot, the cd rom drive ejects - of course, there is no CD in it!

My ultimate goal is to get a standard, updatable 4.4 install onto my 4G Firefly, I am at a loss as to why I get the following errors:

***************************************

Booting 'CentOS-4 i386 (2.6.9-42.EL)'

root (hd0,0)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.EL ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
[Linux-bzImage, setup=0x1400, size=0x16dd65]
initrd /initrd-2.6.9-42.EL.img
[Linux-initrd @ 0x1fefe000, 0x612ef bytes]

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.8 starting
mkrootdev: label / not found
mount: error 2 mounting ext3
mount: error 2 mounting none
switchroot: mount failed: 22
umount /initrd/dev failed: 2
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

***************************************

This is what I did:

- installed CentOS 4.4 from CDs using "expert mode"
- grub bootloader
- /dev/sda1 mounted on /boot  100M
- /dev/sda2 mounted on /          3.9G
- no swap
- server install (w/gdm)

It was suggested that I may be having an issue with USB drivers not getting installed, so I ran mkinitrd including them.  I also uncompressed initrd.gz and tried to add them manually - I had no luck with either method.

Since I am by no means a Linux expert (my background is in data and voice networking), any and all suggestions and URLs will be appreciated!

Mark