On 7/22/2010 6:09 PM, David wrote:
> Has anyone successfully built a USB key for installing centos5.5 either
> manually or using a tool like unetbootin?
>
> I am trying to create one using the 64bit install DVD iso and so far the
> USB either won't boot (unetbootin) or the installation aborts after I
> select the iso location on the USB key (manual).
I was able to successfully install CentOS 32-bit from an 8GB USB flash
drive (4GB is not quite big enough, even for i386) created with this
procedure:
Create a 10M DOS partition on the USB drive and make it active
Create Linux partition using the rest of the drive
mkfs -t vfat /dev/<USB DOS partition>
mkfs /dev/<USB Linux partition>
liveCD-iso-to-disk <boot.iso> /dev/<USB DOS partition>
mount /dev/<USB Linux partition> /mnt
rsync --progress <CentOS.iso> /mnt/
You can get the boot.iso by loop-mounting the CentOS iso and pulling it
out of the /os/i386/images directory, or grab it from one of the mirrors
(the mirror links on the CentOS site link directly to the install isos,
so you'll have to browse up a few directories and then go back down to
find the images directory).
I used 'rsync' here because I hate having a copy process run for 10
minutes with no progress indication. :)
The only problem I found was that the install insisted on installing
grub on the USB drive rather than the target hard drive. I finally had
to skip the grub installation and install it by hand afterwards.
--
Bowie