HowTo Install Fedora 10/11/12 DVD from a 4GB USB stick

[sideways]

There are quite a few articles around, this one's good but a little dated (aimed at F8 users)
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1157197

The %packages section is the most useful in the anaconda-ks.cfg, also the lang, timezone, keyboard, firewall, selinux and rootpw sections can be copied. Any packages installed since installation wont be in the list of course.

The rest of the *.ks you'll need to modify yourself. Have a look at one of the simple base kickstarts from the spin-kickstarts rpm, they are in /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/.

Getting all the packages installed is one thing, but if you've made a lot of config changes then that'll be difficult to completely reproduce (if you have a customised home dir then it might be best to copy that whole to the live install with cp -a)

This is getting off-topic now, so start a new post with any updates on your progress.

[akvino]

Originally Posted by sideways

There are quite a few articles around, this one's good but a little dated (aimed at F8 users)
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1157197

The %packages section is the most useful in the anaconda-ks.cfg, also the lang, timezone, keyboard, firewall, selinux and rootpw sections can be copied. Any packages installed since installation wont be in the list of course.

The rest of the *.ks you'll need to modify yourself. Have a look at one of the simple base kickstarts from the spin-kickstarts rpm, they are in /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/.

Getting all the packages installed is one thing, but if you've made a lot of config changes then that'll be difficult to completely reproduce (if you have a customised home dir then it might be best to copy that whole to the live install with cp -a)

This is getting off-topic now, so start a new post with any updates on your progress.

How about installing livecd, modifying files, creating your own custom ISO (is this part possible), then exporting ISO back onto the livecd - to install it as modified distro?

[sideways]

Originally Posted by akvino

How about installing livecd, modifying files, creating your own custom ISO (is this part possible), then exporting ISO back onto the livecd - to install it as modified distro?

I don't think that's possible. In any case it would be easier to do a normal (not live) install to a usb stick, update and configure it and then just clone the usb stick with dd or boot the stick in different machines as required.

[marko]

Fedora revisor is getting close to being able to preconfigure enough stuff to do this. It depends on how much configuring is needed.

[akvino]

Originally Posted by sideways

There are quite a few articles around, this one's good but a little dated (aimed at F8 users)
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1157197

The %packages section is the most useful in the anaconda-ks.cfg, also the lang, timezone, keyboard, firewall, selinux and rootpw sections can be copied. Any packages installed since installation wont be in the list of course.

The rest of the *.ks you'll need to modify yourself. Have a look at one of the simple base kickstarts from the spin-kickstarts rpm, they are in /usr/share/spin-kickstarts/.

Getting all the packages installed is one thing, but if you've made a lot of config changes then that'll be difficult to completely reproduce (if you have a customised home dir then it might be best to copy that whole to the live install with cp -a)

This is getting off-topic now, so start a new post with any updates on your progress.

OK Sideways - I did look into it. Just one question left - how do I tell Livecd-tool to use my Kickstart when livecd is being made/ installed/ booted.

Thanks

[sideways]

Just to update that this method still applies in F11 (ie boot.iso can be transferred with livecd tools), but the disk size has grown so isomaster is now needed, even for the 32bit DVD, to remove some files before it the iso image can be copied over to a 4gb usb stick (Obviously, for larger capacities this is again not a problem, but remember that if you have formatted with fat32 you'll only get a max file size of 4gb)

Easiest files to remove are from the images directory, you can remove everything except the image.img file which must stay. When saving the modified iso ensure it has the correct name, eg for the preview it is Fedora-11-Preview-i386-DVD.iso.

[ms1234]

Thanks for the excellent help. I followed the instructions and was going mad because I couldn't get it to work when setting the boot.img that is until I noticed that the stick I used was propably not vfat so I started bt formatting it to ext3 and redid the whole thing and presto, no problems booting after that. Now I'm a proud Fedora 10 owner and waiting for 11

[pondlife]

Hi All,

This is my first post - I'm here because I want to say thanks for this thread. Just what I needed!

I've followed the instructions to create a bootable USB stick (a Cruzer Micro 16GB) with the pre-release version of F11 ISO.

I created it on a F10 installation sucessfully but had the same problem as Ankur and had to run:

parted /dev/sdb -s 'toggle 1 boot'

and then run the livecd-iso-to-disk command again.

Before I did any of that tho I had to format my USB stick - here are the steps I took to do that (I had to hunt around for these so I thought it might help if they were included in this thread):

Formatting a 16GB (Cruzer micro 16) USB Stick on Fedora 10.

Power up your Fedora machine and login then stick in USB stick.

Fedora 10 mounts USB device automatically.

Find the USB drives system name and mount point:

$ mount

~
/dev/sdb1 on /media/disk type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=lower,uid=500)

Unmount USB disk:

$ umount /media/disk

Found that fdisk /dev/sdb1 didn’t work as a normal user so su to root:

$ su -
Password:

$ fdisk /dev/sdb1

Options:

p - to show partition
n - for new partition
defaults - take all the defaults until returned to “Command (m for help):”
w - to write the changes

I got some errors here but decided to try the mkfs.ext3 command anyway…

$ mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 /dev/sdb1

I noticed that fdisk ($ fdisk -l) still showed it as FAT32 but once 
I removed the stick and stuck it back in again 
(automatically mounted by Fedora) a right-click on the icon 
and a show of properties showed that it was ext3.

Cheers & Thanks!

pondlife.

[sideways]

Update on F11:

RC4 seems to be the Final, and the i386 DVD fits on 4GB usb without requiring editing with isomaster. But there is no boot.iso in the images directory, so you can now run the livecd-iso-to-disk script on the DVD iso image itself and it will create the necessary boot image.

livecd-iso-to-disk Fedora-11-Preview-i386-DVD.iso /dev/sdb1

The other steps are identical as outlined in post #1 (copying the iso image across is the longest step)

[DennyCrane]

This may be a silly question, but why isn't this done for us?

Not trying to sound like a lazy or technically incompetent ass, but is there a reason Fedora doesn't offer USB packaging like this directly from the download page? I would posit that even those who have the equipment to burn discs could find value in the USB approach. Actually, I have the equipment myself, but prefer to try this out.

[Dana in Philly]

It's kind of ironic here that the usb booting problem is afflicting those with Fedora 9 and 10 -- presumably Fedora's greatest fans! This isn't meant as criticism. It's just kind of a funny situation.

I've been futzing with liveusb-creator and livecd-tools since Tuesday, with no luck booting from the usb (blank screen, blinking cursor) despite these various methods reporting success.

The Common Bugs note over at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo..._fails_to_boot

and the wiki instructions over at:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_t...d_-_Linux_only

ain't workin' for me. I'll try sideways' instructions and see if I can get it going.

Dana in Philly
HP Mini 2140 w/ SLED 10 & Fedora 10 dual booty

[Dana in Philly]

Later on....

That did it! USB stick is now booting. Thanks Sideways for telling us netbookers the proper procedure! It'd be useful if the Fedora 11 installation notes page, bug notes:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo..._fails_to_boot

would link to this forum thread.

Best,

Dana in Philly
HP Mini 2140 w/ SLED 10 & Fedora 10 dual booty, soon to be
HP Mini 2140 w/ Fedora 11 & Moblin 2.0 dual booty

[scottro]

Just as an FYI---I have an 8 GB USB stick, used unetbootin to put the Fedora DVD on it and it booted without a problem. It seems to me that older versions of unetbootin wouldn't do that, but I could easily be wrong--I've played with many distros with unetbootin and it might have been a different DVD.iso.

[FortyArc]

Spiffy, since my DVD burner keeps turning out dud discs.

I'm using LiveUSB Creator on Windows to move the .iso to an 8GB thumbdrive. Freakishly slow, but that's probably because I'm trying to access 8GB by USB. :P

Noob question: is there any reason why the .iso can't just be dragged and dropped into the thumbdrive?

[FortyArc]

Another noob question: what should the contents of a bootable USB drive look like? LiveUSB Creator seems to have renamed my flash drive FEDORA, and there are folders on it. Should there just be an .iso file there? How do I tell by looking at the contents whether something bootable exists?