A bright idea...

[Les Mikesell]

Phil Meyer wrote:
>>
>>    Why not buy a 4 GB Flash USB device for around $50.00 and load F7 
>> on that and then plug it into the USB port of the computer to upgrade 
>> and away you go. Cheaper than a DVD drive with a USB port :-)
>>
> 
> Yup.  My normal mode of operations.  I carry around a 4GB USB thumb 
> drive with two partitions:  1 = boot ; 2 = FAT32 with a custom (pungi 
> rocks!) DVD image on it.

Is there a howto somewhere about the partitioning needed for this? Or is 
it just a matter of making the first partition large enough for a raw 
copy of the boot.img file, then reformatting what's left?  Can you 
specify a kickstart file on the 2nd partition?  How do you know where it 
will be mounted?

> So last week-end my son asks me to build him a media server.  I travel 
> to his place because I want to see my grand babies.  No sweat.  I pop 
> out my thumb drive -- hmmm... won't boot usb.  OK -- hmmm... can't burn 
> a DVD for him, he doesn't have a DVD in that system.  OK, mount the DVD 
> image on my laptop and burn the diskboot.iso to a CDR.  Plug in the USB 
> to his system, boot the bootable CD and proceed to load from the USB 
> stick via my custom kickstart scripts.
> 
> Whew!
> 
> The moral of the story?
> 
> Not all systems will boot from USB, and not all systems have DVD 
> players. :)  Keep a CDR in your laptop bag.

You could also export the dvd image via NFS from the laptop and install 
over the network.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com