Installing RHEL with a memory stick

[Rick Stevens]

On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 23:19 -0600, karlp at ourldsfamily.com wrote:
> On Mon, September 18, 2006 7:29 pm, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-09-18 at 16:20 -0700, Waldher, Travis R wrote:
> >> Any advice on getting RHEL using a memory stick?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I?ve been googling and have come up with nada.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> (the computer doesn?t have CDROM)
> >
> > Well, yeah.  You need to download the first CD ISO image and mount
> > it.  E.g.
> >
> >     # mkdir -p /mnt/work
> >     # mount -t iso9660 -o loop /path/to/iso/image /mnt/work
> >
> > On it, you'll find an images/diskboot.img file.  Copy that to your
> > pen drive using dd.  If the pen drive shows up as /dev/sda, then
> >
> >     # dd if=/mnt/work/images/diskboot.img of=/dev/sda bs=2K
> >
> > Then boot from the pen drive, assuming your BIOS supports it.  If not,
> > and you have a floppy drive, then download SmartBootManager
> >
> > 	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4185
> >
> > and put it on a floppy.  Boot from floppy, specify next boot from the
> > pen drive and voila!  From there, you can do net, diskimage, http or ftp
> > install (all the standard install stuff is there).
> 
> I've been interested in this since finding and using (credit card CD) BBC-LNX
> and DSL for some maintenance issues on some PCs. (I have DSL running on our
> WillCall PC; cool).
> 
> I bought a Everex StepNote laptop and installed FC5 on hda2 (WinXP is on
> hda1). It works great. If I boot with a 512MB thumb drive, it says Operating
> System Missing. I followed the above prompt, and it just hangs now. I had to
> dd of=/dev/sda1, however, not just sda because it didn't even recognize the
> thumb drive on boot and went straight to GRUB.
> 
> So, any hints? I've tried both distros with no luck on both a 128MB and 512MB
> thumb drive.

Then the BIOS doesn't support booting from USB.  The diskboot.img file
is a full image file and should go into /dev/sda--NOT a partition on the
drive.  I quote from the README:

"The diskboot.img file is a VFAT filesystem image that can be written to
a USB pendrive or other bootable media larger than a floppy.  Note that
booting via USB is dependent on your BIOS supporting this.  It should
be written to the device using dd."

Note the word "device", and not "partition".  I know, I've done this
a bunch of times, but the machine's BIOS MUST support booting from USB.
You may have to play with the BIOS' USB settings to make this work, but
it DOES work.

For example, on my HP laptop, you must hit F10, go to the "Advanced"
settings, down to "Boot Order", expand the "Hard Disk" list, and switch
the priority from "HD, USB" to "USB, HD".  I just confirmed this using
a Memorex TravelDrive 128MB pen drive and the bootdisk.img file from
FC5.  Now, if I have a USB drive, it boots off that.  If not, it boots
from hard disk as normal.

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  Memory is the second thing to go, but I can't remember the first! -
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