Fedora 10 on USB but Boot from CD

[godzillarama]

Hello. I've searched for this and found nothing so far -- my apologies if it's out there and I failed to find it. I would like to run the live version of Fedora 10 on a USB drive, and I've got a 4GB drive set up just fine but only one of my machines supports booting from USB. I'd like to have a boot CD that starts the boot process but searches for Fedora on a USB drive, then runs from there. That way I'd have the benefits of the live CD, the speed of USB, and be able to run it on my machines that don't have a BIOS that supports USB boot. Any pointers would be very much appreciated.

[beaker_]

There's a section on bootable cds. You'll have to play with it though. Might be easiest to start from a harddrive or floppy first.

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html

Edit: easiest to modify grub.conf till you get it right i.e.,

[godzillarama]

Cool, Beaker, thanks for that reference, that'll be useful information. But it doesn't specifically provide any boot parameters that cause GRUB to search for boot CD. That's the documentation I'm in search of.

[beaker_]

And that's why you should try installing grub on a floppy or harddrive first. So you can play with grub.conf till you get it right.

Try booting from a live cd (knoppix, fedora... doesn't matter) and look where your usb drive appears (sdb1, sda1...). This will tell you where to tell grub to find root. You need to look at some examples and know what, root, map, noverify and boot will do.

Good luck.

[godzillarama]

Having read your second response, it makes sense to me why you're saying what you're saying, and it's my fault. I wasn't complete and clear on my first post.

I'm intending to re-spin a live CD. The ISO from my custom live CD will then be transferred to a USB drive. Then I want to boot to that on a variety of different machines, even though they don't have a supporting BIOS, not just one machine only. I know how to direct GRUB to a specific root device such as /dev/sda1. I need to have a boot CD that scans for the correct USB drive.

My apologies for failing to explaining it adequately.

[beaker_]

Sorry for the double post but I just realised, you have no native usb support. You should go the grub4dos route, not gnu grub. Unless it's supported now, which I don't know. A quick google for grub4dos will turn it up and the commands are the same so hopefully I didn't lie too much.


Edit: ah crap, I don't know enough c to scan for devices. Sorry best I could do is brute force or edit the boot options on startup.

[beaker_]

Guess I didn't. How about that. Anyway here's a double post.

http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/USB_booting#USB_booting_with_no_BIOS_support_or_wi th_buggy_BIOS


I've never used it but looks like what you're after.

[godzillarama]

Thanks for that Beaker. I had known about PLOP a long time ago, but evidently it has been updated since I last used it. As you may have noticed, it isn't open source, so it may not be possible to change the splash screens, etc., which I want to do since I'm rebranding the live CD I'm building. I would prefer to stick with a Fedora solution only, but some variant of PLOP is what I might end up using. I found another good discussion here, (http://www.911cd.net/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t20450.html) so unless someone else thinks of a truly Fedora-based solution, I'll probably end up using one of those other things.

[Aml]

Hello I am new to the site. I am facing the problem while installing fedora 6. The problem I am facing is that I have a SATA Harddisk and SATA CDwriter and a motherboard Nivida Chipset. The CDwriter is not able to intstall the Fedora.............Can u help me out..