Fedora Core 6 - USB Installation

[Evan Klitzke]

On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 00:43 -0600, Robert Canary wrote:
> I have an 4gig USB stick and I was wondering if anyone knew of any 
> documentation for how to set up a USB boot.  I found several USB boot 
> images but they all reduce the USB down to the size of a floppy.  I want 
> to set it up so the installation reades everything from the USB stick

In general, the way that bootable Linux CDs work is that there are a
bunch of regular files on the CD, and then isolinux is used to master
the CD. Isolinux is the bootloader that loads the kernel and so forth.
Typically the config files for it are in /isolinux (in the iso
filesystem).

What I have done in the past is to mount the CD contents somewhere on
disk (e.g. mount -o loop install.iso /mnt/iso), copy the contents of the
iso onto the disk (in this case your USB drive), and then install GRUB
onto the device that I am using to boot from. Then you look
at /isolinux/isolinux.cfg and make a GRUB line that looks sort of like
the line in the isolinux.cfg file. When you boot off the USB drive, GRUB
will load up and if you have it properly configured, will be able to
load the kernel and initrd that you put on the stick. After that, the
system will boot just as it would have if you had booted off an actual
CD.

This is how I installed Fedora on my system (in my case, using the
network install iso), and I have used this approach to install other
Linux distributions. It doesn't always work, but normally if you can use
an ISO meant for a network install that doesn't try to do anything fancy
then things will be fine.

-- 

Evan Klitzke