[CentOS] CentOS-5.5 Live CD & netinstall

Fri Apr 8 00:28:11 UTC 2011
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

Les Mikesell wrote:

>>> I assume that the lack of a CD drive on the HP micro-server
>>> is a sign of things to come,
>>> so I would hope there would be an official method of installing CentOS
>>> on such a machine.
>>>
>>
>> I think what Les suggested is one official supported method as outlined
>> in the Installation Guide. How "official" do you want it ?
> 
> Here's the prompt you'll see and what it means:
> 
> http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html-
single/Installation_Guide/index.html#s1-begininstall-nfs-x86

I see no mention there of the method you suggested, which was
---------------------------
I don't get it.  
That's the whole point of the boot.img, 
which is made to simply dd onto a usb device.  
And having booted from that, there is nothing different
than any other way of booting into the installer
except that you have to tell it where the install media is.
---------------------------

Actually, I can't find "boot.img" on the DVD:

[tim at helen ~]$ cd /mnt/dvd
[tim at helen dvd]$ sudo find . -name disk.img -print
[tim at helen dvd]$ 

I see images/bootdisk.img .
Is that what you meant?

In any case, I tried dd-ing this to /dev/sdb (the USB stick).

[tim at helen dvd]$ sudo cp images/diskboot.img /tmp
[tim at helen dvd]$ cd /tmp
[tim at helen tmp]$ sudo dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdb
24576+0 records in
24576+0 records out
12582912 bytes (13 MB) copied, 0.766341 seconds, 16.4 MB/s

But when I re-booted my laptop with the USB stick in
(having made sure it was top of the boot order in the Bios)
it failed to start.

I re-formatted the USB stick under Windows,
and tried dd-ing diskboot.img to /dev/sdb1
but the outcome was the same.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland