Les Mikesell wrote: >> 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. > > It should go to the raw disk device, not a partition and you shouldn't > need to > format first. The reason I re-formatted it was that fdisk said there was no valid partition table after dd-ing bootdisk.img onto /dev/sdb . > I guess you could > try grabbing a different copy from a mirror site like: > http://centos.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/centos/5.5/os/i386/images/ I'll try again, now that I'm sure what you mean. Incidentally, I also tried livecd-iso-to-disk boot.iso /dev/sdb1 but on re-booting there was just a ";" on my laptop screen. (The BIOS was set to use the USB stick, and in fact started fine with CentOS Live USB and Fedora Live USB.) -- 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