[CentOS] isolinux on a pendrive from disk 1

[Jason Hartley]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Jerry Geis <geisj at pagestation.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I just grabbed an 8gig thumb drive, took disk 1 centos 4 i386,
> copied the isolinux directory files to my thumbdrive, then ran syslinux -sf
> /dev/sdc1
> on the device plugged it into my laptop  and it does not boot.
>
> Is there a step(s) I am missing to get a bootable thumbdrive with centos?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jerry

If your goal is to boot off the USB stick and install I have does the
following steps recently with a 4gig flash drive:

1. Need to setup the MBR
    - ex. cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdb
2. Use fdisk to create two partitions and make the first bootable:
     - The first should be 14 megs, fs type should be set to "b" (W95 FAT32)
     - The second can be the rest of the drive
     - Make sure set the boot flag on the first partition (many
instructions I found on the web did not mention and it was key)
3. Now you need to dd off the bootdisk.img on the first disk to the
first partition:
     - ex. dd if=/mnt/images/diskboot.img /dev/sdb1

At this point you should have a bootable flash drive and have the
option of creating a file system on the second partition then adding
the ISO(s) to it along with a kickstart config file.  I used the
aboved steps on a 4gig stick and was able to put a custom kickstart
config file, along with a DVD iso  on the second partition.

Good luck!

-Jason