Installing Fedora-12 from USB

[Timothy Murphy]

R. G. Newbury wrote:

>  > >I've been trying to install Fedora-12 from a memory stick
>  > >to which I have transferred the KDE Live CD
>  > >using livecd-iso-to-disk .

> If you have a reasonably recent ASUS mb with an AMi BIOS, setting it to
> boot from USB is rather obscure. You need to plug in the USB stick and
> reboot. The USB device will then show up in the list of hard drives
> under Boot Order (going from memory there, but its on the Boot tab, and
> the second or third entry, iirc). Move the USB HDD entry to the top of
> the list, then save and reboot.

Thanks for the suggestion,
but it seems my machine is too ancient - about 10 years old, I think.
It has an Asus P2B-LS motherboard, with Award BIOS.
I have been unable to find anything in the BIOS to allow
booting from the USB memory stick.

I tried booting again from the KDE Live CD vmlinuz0 and initrd0.img
copied to the hard disk, with the USB partition given as root
in the kernel line.
As far as I can see, the machine does boot from the USB stick,
but the boot fails, saying that the check of boot1, 
which is actually my Fedora-11 /boot partition, has failed.
I've run "fsck.ext3 -f" on this partition (after unmounting it),
and it seems perfectly OK.

It seems to me that something odd happens in this scenario.
I don't see why it tries to check this partition anyway -
as far as I can see, it should only be looking at the USB stick,
so where does it get a list of partitions to check?
It seems in fact to be reading the Fedora-11 /etc/fstab ,
but I don't see why.

I tried going into the interactive boot, but this failed
(pressing "I" had no effect),
and in any case I would not have known what to do.

Is there a kernel command to omit fsck checks?



-- 
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