[CentOS] Installing from USB flash drive

Wed May 26 18:23:01 UTC 2010
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Bowie wrote:
>   
>
>> Agreed.  It's truly obnoxious that we can specify which drive to install
>> the OS onto, but we can't specify where to put the boot loader.
>>
>> What I did was skip the grub install and then install it from the rescue
>> prompt.  Unfortunately, this left me with no grub.conf at all, so I had
>> to look at another machine to get the proper format and manually create
>> grub.conf.  After that, however, it booted normally.  I'm doing a 'yum
>> update' now, which includes a new kernel.  I'm keeping my fingers
>> crossed that it will update my grub.conf properly.
>>     
>
> Once it's on, it's fairly stable... though the update of the kernel does
> *not* always work correctly. With nearly 200 machines that I'm rolling out
> updates to, not infrequently, I'll see that the default= line in
> /etc/grub.conf is reset... to the last kernel,rather than the current, or
> to the debug kernel. I always have to check to verify that it's pointing
> correctly before rebooting.
>   

And, in fact, that is exactly what happened.  The default= line was set
to 1, so it booted the old kernel instead of the new one.  Other than
that, it seems to be fine.  I wonder what causes that?  I've never
noticed that behavior in my other systems.  (But maybe I should go check
now...)

-- 
Bowie