Re: Installing Fedora-12 from USB stick

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On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 01:30:04PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Monday 07 December 2009, Timothy Murphy 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 .
> >
> >The problem is that the ancient machine I am dealing with
> >does not support booting from the USB stick.
> >
   ...
> >I should say that this is a purely theoretical experiment;
> >I know there are many other ways I could install Fedora-12.
> >But I installed F-12 on several other machines using the USB stick,
> >and it would be useful to know if I could actually update
> >all machines in this way.
> 
> I wouldn't mind being able to do something similar myself. I have an 8Gb 
> stick with the F12 install iso on it, as a file at the instant, and my dvd 
> writer seems to have turned itself into a write only for dvd's but is still 
> reading cd's ok.  However, this asus bios I have not seen a boot from usb 
> option in its boot menu's.  Any ideas as to how to proceed?
 
On all my machines that are capable of booting from a USB memory stick
the stick shows up as another hard disk.  With a bootable stick
inserted, reboot and enter the BIOS.  Look for "hard drive boot
priority", or something like that.  You may see the memory stick
listed, but (stupidly) it's usually the last item listed.  If you move
it up to first position and save, it'll boot from it.
Sadly, after you remove it and reinsert it, the BIOS will usually
revert to using it last.  (What goes thru the minds of BIOS coders?)

If the BIOS fails to list the memory stick as a hard drive, you're out
of luck, I'm afraid.

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.


-- 
	David A. De Graaf    DATIX, Inc.    Hendersonville, NC
	dad@xxxxxxxx         www.datix.us

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