I have an old Amilo D68 laptop that cannot boot from a usbkey and I wanted to run a test install of the beta for f14 but without having to burn a physical DVD..... so I started poking around for a way to do it from a usbkey. Since the BIOS does not allow booting from a usb device I found that there is a project that has a simple means to get a bootable usbkey to boot - PLOP. I downloaded the package from their website, and made a grub stanza entry to boot the plpbt.bin file placed in the /boot directory - this then gives a menu that offers to boot from a usb device. OK part success. (but not supported by Fedora!) I then used the dd method to copy the DVD iso for f14 to the key on another machine.... took ages but it did complete. So now the media is ready I hoped! Booted the laptop with the new usbkey in place, got the PLOP file to boot and when selecting the usb boot absolutely nothing happened - I tried several times but the key simply would not respond. (Initial thought was the PLOP was not working) OK different tack - a method I have used before when I was stuck with the fedora method and partly frowned upon in Fedora circles, and at the very least unsupported - resort to fallback position using unetbootin unetbootin is a yum installable package so I used it on an f12 machine to prepare the same usbkey (after reformatting it with gparted, and placing a single fat32 partition with a boot flag on it) So I used unetbootin to write the netinst.iso file to the key for f14 beta. Just for good measure I then copied the DVD iso file to the key as well in the hope that I would be able to get a full DVD iso install off the key. So back to booting the PLOP on the laptop with the newly written usbkey in its slot - PLOP boots, and upon selecting usb, then unetbootin boots up nicely, and the default install finds the netinst.iso boot.... Selecting the key as the source and deselecting the updates.img file in the install menu allows the full DVD iso to be used for the install - everything is normal, but a caution is to watch that you do not allow the install to put grub on the mbr of the key, but switch drives and put grub on the MBR of the HD in the laptop - now the install appears to proceed normally (it is still running!) Could I have attempted to boot the DVD iso by trying to write that using unetbootin directly to the key - I don't know but I do know that in the past for f12 that failed me miserably where booting netinst.iso and referring to the full DVD iso did work for me in the past! However my point is that doing a full DVD iso install should not need to involve this rigmarole - and it should be made a lot easier for users to install from a usbkey for the full DVD install in an easy way. I have certainly had the dd method fail in the past for f12 on a completely different machine. Why did the dd method fail? I don't know but I have not had much success with that. Then there is livecd-iso-to-disk - well what needs to be answered from the docs and made really clear is does this work for livecd isos only? netinst.iso? DVD iso? I usually do NOT want to install from a livecd for many reasons, like many packages are simply not there in the livecd - like the ssh server as a simple example. I think that this method of install is not as well documented as it should be - and there appears to be residual bugs that need resolving (like for the dd method I mention above) - there also needs to be clear and separate instructions on how to boot from a usbkey for a live distribution and separately for the full DVD install iso.... they are different cases. I would value comments on this? -- mike c -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
