[CentOS] CentOS-5.5 Live CD & netinstall

Wed Apr 6 23:17:34 UTC 2011
Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net>

Timothy Murphy wrote:

>>> I've looked quite carefully at my CentOS-5.5 Live CD (on a USB stick),
>>> and I don't see a Network Install option anywhere.
> 
>> Try hitting the space bar during the Automatic boot countdown screen.
>> That should give you the boot menu with the option to do the network
>> install.
> 
> Thanks.
> I had actually found that by chance.

To continue my personal saga,
I did manage to get CentOS-5.5 running on my HP micro-server
(an excellent machine, by my experience so far)
by running Network Install, as was suggested, from a CentOS Live USB stick,
and accessing the DVD ISO on another machine by NFS.

I had already partitioned the hard disk with the USB stick,
so I opted for a Custom Installation (as I always do)
and used these partitions.

The only slight problem was that when I re-booted after installation,
I could only get a grub> prompt, and no kernel could be found.
(Also, rather oddly, during installation I was only offered /dev/sda2 -
which I had nominated as /boot - as location for grub installation.)

I checked with the USB stick that everything was in place on the hard disk,
and then mounted /dev/sda5 as /mnt/hd , and /dev/sda2 as /mnt/hd/boot ,
and ran "grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hd /dev/sda".
This gave the warning that /boot/grub/devices.map 
had /dev/sda as hd1 and /dev/sdb (the USB stick) as hd0.
But after editing devices.map and running grub-install again,
all was well, and I could re-boot into CentOS on the hard disk.

If anyone can suggest a simpler way of installing CentOS
on a machine without a CD drive I should be interested to hear.



-- 
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