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 -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
