On Sun, 2007-01-28 at 16:04 +0000, Julius Maclean wrote: > Hi Chaps, > > First post. Appologies in advance if this is the wrong list. This concerns installation of Fedora based distros from a USB key. I've read the guides that say one should run; > dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda > > This works fine and I've been able to install OS using this method. However the partition table that this command creates is rather unusable for any thing other than installations. [output of fdisk -l listed below]. Here is what I have done in the past. First, you partition the drive normally, using ext2/3 or FAT for the first partition. If you want to use the drive with Windows, obviously FAT is the way to go, if not then it doesn't really matter. Then you install GRUB onto that partition, just as it was a normal hard disc. Then you take the ISO for the CD you want to be able to boot from, and copy the contents of the ISO onto the USB drive. When I installed FC6 I downloaded the network install "boot.iso" and just copied off the kernel and initrd, but in principle you can download a real install CD/DVD and put that on the USB drive as well. This is how I installed Fedora onto my laptop (it is one of those "legacy free" laptops without a CD drive), so I guarantee you it will work! The next step is figuring out how to get GRUB to boot the drive properly. I'll do an example of how I would actually do this in real life, using the Fedora boot.iso net install image: $ mkdir iso $ sudo mount -o loop boot.iso iso $ cat iso/isolinux/isolinux.cfg --- snip --- label linux kernel vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.img label text kernel vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.img text --- snip --- I just want the regular installer, so it looks like I want to load the vmlinuz kernel and use the initrd.img initrd. So what you want in /mnt/usbdrive/boot/grub/menu.lst (or whatever) is a line like this: title Fedora Core 6 Net Install kernel (hd0)/isolinux/vmlinuz initrd (hd0)/isolinux/initrd.img Obviously you'll have to replace the (hd0) with the appropriate entry from the device.map file in your GRUB installation. Some installers have lots of extra options that must be passed to them. For example, you can see in the isolinux.cfg file that the "text" install appended an option text to the kernel line. If you wanted to add this option, you would put it on the kernel line in your GRUB config, e.g. kernel (hd0)/isolinux/vmlinuz text This general method (putting GRUB on the drive, and using it to load the install CD's kernel) will work for most Linux install CDs. Sometimes it doesn't work (or you will need to change some things) if the installer does weird things like actually try to access the CD drive of the computer, but I've never had any problems using it with a text installer, and it nearly always works with regular graphical installs as well. (Off the top of my head, I know that it doesn't work with the Ubuntu live CD, I've tried it.) I hope this helps! -- Evan Klitzke
