Install "Askmethod" support for a USB or Firewire drive ?

Kim Lux lux at diesel-research.com
Fri Oct 29 15:48:55 UTC 2004


I don't know if anyone shares this sentiment, but I consider installing
from burnt ISO CDROMs to be a slow process. 

I'm wondering if it is possible to use askmethod with a USB IDE drive.
I noticed that the USB devices were detected during the FC3 install boot
up, but that they didn't appear in the disk druid partition list, for
example. 

As it is right now, users have to download the ISOs, then burn disks,
then verify disks, then install from them.  This is a slow process if
one is using a 4x CDRW disk in a slow CDROM drive. 

What I'd like to be able to do is download the ISOs to an external USB
drive and then use askmethod to tell anaconda that the ISOs are on the
USB drive.  This would save the effort of burning the CDROMs and
performing a media check on each one.  It would also install a lot
faster from the USB drive than from the CDROM.  I think this, with
kickstart, would be a great way to install and/or upgrade a number of
non networked computers quickly.  

One could also put a bunch of things on the external drive, such as the
source RPMs, various rescue tools currently not on the FC boot disk,
etc. 

I found askmethod nfs to be a bit quirky.  If it detects the network
card right off and the server has simple access, ie no gateways, etc,
then it works pretty well.  Throw a stubborn network card into the mix
and a gateway or two and I'm less enthusiastic about it.  

BTW: I don't think my computer, a laptop, can boot directly from a USB
device.  The BIOS doesn't give the user that option.  I'd still have to
do the initial boot from a CDROM.   





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