On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 2:40 PM, Christopher A. Williams <chriswfedora@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I love the speed of the USB installer from the Live CD...! > > But I would also like to stop using so many DVDs for, well everything. > USB drives are much more convenient, portable, durable, and reusable. > My ideal scenario would be able to put the DVD installer ISO onto a > bootable USB stick as well - specifically for the portability USB drives > give over DVDs, and also because USB sticks are basically a lot faster > and easily re-used once I'm done with the install. I mean, do you use > the install DVD for anything else once you've done the install? > > Again - this would not be a Live image. It would be the DVD installer > itself running from a USB drive for the specific purpose of doing > exactly what the DVD installer does now. > > I've tried to figure out how to do this a couple of releases back, was > unsuccessful after about 30 minutes - OK, so I gave up pretty fast.. :) > - and went back to just burning the DVD. But I'm still interested in > having this as an option and I'd bet I'm not alone. > > Anyone have a how-to/magic incantation to do this? Could we eventually > make this an option for Fedora installers too? > I have done so in the past - basically what you need to do is make a bootable usbkey and then put the netinst.iso on it via one of the advertised techniques from the Fedora wiki - or using unetbootin. On the same key in the root directory you put the DVD iso file as well as the images directory from that same file. (I don't know if the images directory is still needed for f13 but perhaps someone knowledgable will chime in here? It won't do any harm having it there anyway!) Then once netinst.iso has been booted you can select a hard drive install, and then navigate to the top directory of the key. This should then be exactly like a normal hard drive install with one potential gotcha - that is when the grub installation section is reached, the default (unless this is changed in f13 or f12) is to place grub on the MBR of the usbkey as the default. At this point you *must* make sure that you select the MBR on the drive that you are installing on, instead of the key otherwise when you complete the install and remove the key then your shiny new installation won't boot! Other than that I did this for F10 and F11 without major issues. Of course if you already have Fedora running then you can place the DVD iso on your hard drive, and copy out the images directory by loop mounting it, and placing it in the same directory as the iso. Then also copy out vmlinux and initrd.img to /boot naming them say F13.install and F13.install.img respectively and then adding a grub stanza to /boot/grub/grub.conf to point the kernel line and next line to these two files, and name the stanza something like F13-install - then when you next boot you can select this grub entry and initiate your install using a hard drive method and point to the DVD iso on your hard drive. This will only work if the iso and images directory are on a partition that will not be formatted during the install. This is in fact the way I usually do my installs to the N+1 version on any machine. -- mike c -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
