[CentOS] CentOS-5.5 Live CD & netinstall

Fri Apr 8 20:30:00 UTC 2011
Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov>

William Hooper wrote on 04/08/2011 03:50 PM:
> Forgive me if I've missed it mentioned, but it looks like the option
> is only being removed from the LiveCD.  Using the netinstall.iso is
> still available and would be a more efficient way of doing network
> installs anyway (9.5M vs 685M).

Precisely.

> Unless things have changed since I messed with network installs (which
> is has been a while), all you really need is some way to boot the
> kernel and initrd files.  It doesn't matter if you start with grub,
> lilo, syslinux, etc.  I remember using the boot loader of an existing
> system to start the network install (but I don't remember what version
> it was) on a machine without a working optical drive.

Still works - can just copy vmlinuz and initrd.img from the 
images/pxeboot/ or isolinux/ directories and add a GRUB (or whatever 
bootloader) stanza to boot them.

> The issues you saw with grub being installed on the USB stick instead
> of the HDD are a bigger concern in my book.  I wonder if you you have
> better luck installing GRUB on the HDD MBR, booting from the HDD and
> using grub to load the kernel and initrd off the USB stick.

That is a known issue and is addressed in the Wiki article:
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey

Phil