Installing RHEL with a memory stick

karlp at ourldsfamily.com karlp at ourldsfamily.com
Fri Oct 6 21:07:07 UTC 2006 

On Mon, October 2, 2006 12:21 pm, Rick Stevens wrote:
> 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:

Actually, it does. I just wasn't doing it right. I was trying to install and
boot DSL v3.01 and figured (wrongly) that using USB-HDD install would/should
work. I found that USB-ZIP install works marvelously... To verify that the PC
would boot from USB I did what you said and got the fedora core 5 install
screen (I would like a little distro on the flash drive of FC5 but DSL is very
nice, too).

>
> "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.

I had to set the BIOS as USB-ZIP boot on the PC I've got working. One other PC
a friend has didn't have a setting for USB boot, but it booted fine on it,
too. That was cool. He may try Linux now.

>
> 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.

So, short story made longer by this geezer + 1 person (that's a 51 year old),
I got it to work and can boot fine.

Karl

>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - 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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-- 
karl
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