[CentOS] Installing from USB flash drive

Wed May 26 17:09:09 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Bowie wrote:
> m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>>> Bowie Bailey wrote, On 05/26/2010 10:59 AM:
>>>
>>>> I successfully created an install media on a USB flash drive, but now
>>>> I have a minor problem installing from it.  Whenever I run the
>>>> installer, it insists on installing grub on /dev/sdb (the flash drive)
>>>> rather than
>>>> /dev/sda (the hard drive where I'm installing everything).
>>>>
>>>> Is there a way to convince the installer to put grub in the right
>>>> place?
<snip>
> 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.

         mark