Installing FC6 from USB drive

[Jim Cornette]

Rick Bilonick wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 23:01 -0400, Terry Polzin wrote:
>> On Sunday October 29 2006 18:31, Rick Bilonick wrote:
>>> On Sun, 2006-10-29 at 18:38 -0400, Terry Polzin wrote:
>>>> On Sunday October 29 2006 16:49, Rick Bilonick wrote:
>>>>> I've heard that FC6 can be installed from a USB drive. The RedHat site
>>>>> that has info on USB install seems to be down. Can anyone explain how
>>>>> to install FC6 from a USB drive? Do I need to remove everything from my
>>>>> USB drive and just put the contents from the DVD iso disc onto the USB
>>>>> drive and change the bios settings to boot from the USB drive?
>>>>>
>>>>> Can I put the DVD iso file on my hard drive and install from there?
>>>>>
>>>>> Rick
>>>> You can install from a USB drive you need expert mode to see the USB
>>>> devices at boot.
>>>>
>>>> Alternatively, you can put the DVD image in a filesystem that will not be
>>>> updated during the install/upgrade process.  You still need to boot from
>>>> the boot.iso or ore of the other images in the image directory on the DVD
>>>> image. Booting from the rescue CD should also work.  At the boot prompt
>>>> respond " linux askmethod"
>>> OK, I loaded the DVD disk contents to the USB hard drive. But I'm
>>> wondinger if I should be copying the iso file itself. When I boot the
>>> DVD iso file, I eventually get to a menu that includes /dev/sda1 and
>>> asks for a directory holding "images". I've tried putting several things
>>> here (like "images") but it reports "Failed to read
>>> directory /tmp/hdimage/images: No such file or directory."
>>>
>> OK how did you copy the DVD.iso to the USB drive?
>> I'm guessing that you mounted the image -o loop and then 
>> did some kind of a recursive copy down the tree of the loopback mount-point
>> to the USB disk.  If that's the case the directory containing the image 
>> is /dev/sda1.
> 
> Unfortunately, no. The iso file is on my work computer. All I had was
> the DVD install disk which I copied to the hard drive and of course it
> doesn't work. I'll save a copy of the iso file as a data file on a DVD,
> and then copy it to the hard drive and mount it as you suggest. I should
> have known that from other things I've done. I think it should be
> something like:
> 
> mount FC-6-x86_64-DVD.iso -r -t iso9660 -o loop /some_mount_pt
> 
> I'm still not clear as to the directory. If I dump the iso to the USB
> drive or to the hard drive, there are going to be other directories and
> files on the drive. Somehow I have to tell it where to find things but
> it's unclear to me.
> 
> Thanks for your help.
> 
> Rick
> 

I believe that you need to start the install using expert mode. Then you 
should be prompted for install from hard drive. There should be a prompt 
for the device followed by a prompt for directory where you locate the 
iso file or files. Anaconda should do the mount and loop functionality 
steps.

This worked for an IDE drive. I am not sure if it would work for getting 
the files from a USB drive though. It should, but am not positive.

Without running expert, USB drive drivers are not loaded.

Your experimentation required.

Jim

-- 
"I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and
  my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes."
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