Installing Fedora-12 from USB stick

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 10 December 2009, David A. De Graaf wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:30:04PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
[...]

>If the BIOS fails to list the memory stick as a hard drive, you're out
>of luck, I'm afraid.
>
If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any at all...

>Here, for the record, are my notes on how to create a bootable memory
>stick that's equivalent to the installation DVD.  It's a bit more
>intricate than you've described.
>
>
>***   Update for F12 - 11/20/09   ***
>
>It's much easier to install Fedora from a bootable USB memory stick
>that contains the DVD iso image than burning an actual DVD disk.
>Previously, I was able to squeeze both the i386 and x86_64 iso images
>onto a single 8 GB stick, but it required editing the images to delete
>irrelevant foreign language components.  With F12 I gave up and put
>each system on a separate USB stick.
>
>Here's what I did:
>
>1)  Download both images:
>  i386:
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad       1511 Nov 12 01:23 Fedora-12-i386-CHECKSUM
>  -rw-r--r-- 1 dad dad 3204427776 Nov  8 19:02 Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso
>
>  x86_64:
>  -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad       1525 Nov 12 01:24 Fedora-12-x86_64-CHECKSUM
>  -rw-rw-r-- 1 dad dad 3537600512 Nov  8 19:11 Fedora-12-x86_64-DVD.iso
>
>and run sha256sum on each to verify they're correct.
>
>
>2)  Insert a USB stick to hold the 386 image and note the device name
>assigned, eg, /dev/sdb.
>Use    fdisk /dev/sdb   to create a single partition, /dev/sdb1, of type
>Linux, and set it bootable.
>
>3)  Make an ext2 filesystem on /dev/sdb1.  To maximize the available
>space, eliminate items that are customarily included in a filesystem:
>
>do NOT use -j to create a journal file
>set the number of inodes to only 100
>set the reserved block percentage to 0
>  mkfs.ext2 -N 100 -m 0 /dev/sdb1
>
>4)  Install a bootable mini-Linux by running livecd-iso-to-disk
>  livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --noverify Fedora-11-i386-DVD.iso
> /dev/sdb1
>
>5)  Copy the install.img file and the big iso file
>Create mount points for the iso and the USB partition.
>  mkdir /mnt/iso
>  mkdir /mnt/usb
>
>  mount -o loop  Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso    /mnt/iso
>  mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
>  mkdir /mnt/usb/images
>  cp /mnt/iso/images/install.img  /mnt/usb/images/
>  cp Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso  /mnt/usb/
>
>  umount /mnt/usb /mnt/iso
>and remove the USB stick.
>
>
>Repeat for the x86_64 version.
>


-- 
Cheers, Gene
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