[CentOS] booting CentOS in rescrue mode from USB (+over network)

Tue Aug 14 04:28:07 UTC 2007
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

Martin Minka wrote:
> Hello,
> is there a way to boot CentOS 4.5 from USB flash key in rescue mode ?
> The prefered solution would be to have booting part of CentOS started by
> SysLinux and download the content of CD1 from a network server (HTTP),
> like Anaconda is able to use command "method".

It is possible to do this, but is very shaky because it very much
depends on your bios support for booting from a usb key.

The better way to do this is to just either setup a PXE boot server with
support for this vmlinuz/initrd.img:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/i386/images/pxeboot/

(you pick your version for "5", and your arch for "i386" ... then
download off the mirror servers ... then add a "linux rescue" when
booting from that on PXE.

===OR===

you can put those vmlinuz/initrd.img files on all your servers
(somewhere in /boot) and create a grub entry on all the machines that
have the kernel line:

kernel /path_to/vmlinuz rescue
initrd /path_to/initrd.img

You will then need to have a tree to point to via a network install.

This method works on all centos servers regardless of whether the USB
key can be booted from or not.

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