[CentOS] boot thumbdrive with CentOS 7 ISO???

[Gordon Messmer]

On 12/15/2015 10:15 AM, ken wrote:
>
> It's good to that.  I've just tried that seven times (three different 
> flashdrives 'dd' using different USB ports, then created one CD) and 
> the media test failed each time. I wish those downloads listed 
> cksums/md5sums.

As far as I can tell, they do:
http://mirror.confluxtech.com/centos/7/isos/x86_64/

Various sums for the ISOs, and signatures for the sum file.

> It's good to have all this info  together in one  email.
>
> On the other hand, people should know the Minimal really sucks:
>
> * No dual-boot set up.

CentOS is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whose target use case 
is business servers and workstations.  Dual-boot is not a typical or 
supported use case for RHEL.

Dual-boot can be set up manually by editing /etc/grub.d/40_custom:

    menuentry "Windows" {
        set root='(hd0,1)'
        chainloader +1
    } 


Adjust (hd0,1) to match the partition number where Windows is installed.

Run "grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2-efi.cfg"

> * The resultant OS was text only.  I.e., it wouldn't run init 5... 
> trying to do so would cause to hang.

I don't recall who recommended that you use the Minimal ISO, but it was 
bad advice.  Minimal is useful to experienced admins who want to build a 
very small system image with only the specific packages they need.  It 
can be used to build a desktop system, but that's a lot of work (or 
knowledge).

You would have been better off with CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1511.iso or 
CentOS-7-x86_64-LiveGNOME-1511.iso (or KDE).  I apologize on everyone's 
behalf for not contradicting that advice.

> * Maybe the above problem was due to bad coding somewhere-- the entire 
> OS horked a couple times... then I finally saw error code saying, 
> "kernel panic".  I haven't gotten one of those in decades.

There's not much to go on there.  We have no idea what caused the panic, 
whether it was a bug or not.

> Geez, what a terrible ISO distro!

I don't think that's a fair assessment.  CentOS (and RHEL) is one of the 
most stable systems I've ever used.