On Fri, 2006-06-23 at 17:31 -0700, Mike wrote: > Greetings CentOS Fans. > > I'm working on an Inspiron 9400 Laptop. It supports booting from USB > devices, so I'd like to install CentOS on a USB hard drive as an > alternative to XP. > > I tried booting to the 4.3 (disk 1) CD, but it doesn't see the USB > Drive when it gets to the stage of partitioning... any idea what's > involved in getting the USB drive recognized so I can install CentOS > onto it? OK - got my curiosity up. Had wanted a USB stick install also. Was unable to figure out how to get the installer to see the USB thumb drive, despite being able to modprobe ehci-hcd, scsi_mod, etc. in the Ctrl-Alt-F2 virtual console. (Anybody else able to manage this? Would have allowed a direct install to USB if it had been possible to make it visible to the installer.) Here's a kludge for a (per Karanbir - unsupported) 2GB-USB-key-bootable CentOS 4.3 install: In a nutshell - do a minimal install to a hard disk partition (may be done on a different machine - that was my method); boot to it; insert, fdisk, mke2fs, and mount the USB stick; copy the installed system to the USB drive; edit /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf; make an appropriate initrd; grub-install; and away you go. Used a procedure based on http://www.simonf.com/usb/ for FC3. In more detail (and omitting some trial/error): Installed minimal system to a 2GB partition (since my USB drive is 2GB) using custom install with disk-druid to install to a single partition (not using LVM), and ignoring warnings about no swap. Booted from the installed system, logged on as root, and inserted USB drive which was then recognized. On my system the USB drive is /dev/sda. Ran: # fdisk /dev/sda (Made primary partition 1, filling up the entire 2GB USB device, and made active.) # mke2fs -jL /el4 /dev/sda1 # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt # tar lcf - / | tar xf - -C /mnt Edited /mnt/etc/fstab to look like: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LABEL=/el4 / ext3 defaults 1 1 none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 none /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edited /mnt/boot/grub/grub.conf to look like: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- default=0 timeout=5 hiddenmenu title CentOS-4 i386 (2.6.9-34.EL) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-34.EL ro root=LABEL=/el4 initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-34.EL.img ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [First guessed (hd1,0) but GRUB sees the USB drive as (hd0,0) when it is selected as the boot device.] Ran: # chroot /mnt # mkinitrd -f --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod \ --preload=sd_mod /boot/initrd-2.6.9-34.EL.img 2.6.9-34.EL # grub-install /dev/sda Plugged the USB key into my laptop, booted and chose USB boot device. Let Kudzu remove/install new hardware. Success! Logged on as root, ran: # yum update # mkinitrd -f --preload=ehci-hcd --preload=usb-storage --preload=scsi_mod \ --preload=sd_mod /boot/initrd-2.6.9-34.0.1.EL.img 2.6.9-34.0.1.EL # yum install emacs xorg-x11 system-config-display xterm # yum groupinstall "XFCE-4.2" "Graphical Internet" (Group "GNOME Desktop Environment" was too big for the stick. Might be able to manage a GNOME or KDE environment by careful package selection. The updates and installs could have been done before the move to the USB drive. Using a larger install partition and cleaning up install packages before the copy operation might have allowed more packages on the target USB device.) Rebooted to new kernel, ran: # system-config-display Added user with useradd. Logged in as new user and ran: $ switchdesk XFCE $ startx Got a GUI environment. Not exactly pretty, and may be problematic when booting on other hardware, but did yield a reasonable CentOS 4.3 system on USB media. (I'd still recommend a dual-boot install of CentOS with XP on the laptop if you want to use it very much. Knoppix Live-CD, or SuSE or Mandrake installers can be used to shrink an NTFS partition to make room.) Phil