[CentOS] Install (not boot) from USB drive?

Sat Apr 14 00:23:53 UTC 2007
John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>

Kenneth Porter wrote:
> On Friday, April 13, 2007 2:03 PM -0500 Les Mikesell 
> <lesmikesell at 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;-)







-- 

Cheers
John

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