[ale] making a usb thumb drive bootable from a dvd install disk

[Greg Freemyer]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Geoffrey <lists at serioustechnology.com> wrote:
> Greg Freemyer wrote:
>  > Is the thumb drive big enough to hold the entire DVD?
>
>  Yeah, the dvd is 3.5G and it's a 4G drive.
>
>
>  >
>  > If so, it may be as simple as:
>  >
>  > dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/dev/sdX bs=4k conv=noerror
>
>  Well, I was trying to work from the iso image, but I guess I could stick
>  the dvd into the drive and try that.
>

An ISO is just a raw dd copy, so change that to dd if=file.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=4k

>
>  >
>  > I actually doubt that will work, but it is worth trying.
>  >
>  > The issue is that the DVD actually has 2 partitions on it I believe.
>  > One is a 640K bootable floppy image, and the other is what you see
>  > when you mount the DVD normally.
>  >
>  > So on the thumb drive you need to recreate the 2 partitions and
>  > populate them from the 2 DVD sources.
>
>  But I would expect dd to simply make a raw copy, so in theory it should
>  work.
>

I'm not sure that a DVD has the same partition table scheme that a
thumbdrive has.  Thus my thought they you may have to create the
create the partitions manually, then populate them.

>  >
>  > Hope that at least helps you research your issue.
>
>  Trying to install Red Hat EL 5 and the dvd drive gives errors when
>  trying to mount the dvd.  It boots find, but then can't mount.
>
>  Trying to come up with an alternative.

Sounds flaky.  I use SUSE, so I have not tried to mount RH DVDs, but
are you sure you don't have a corrupt dvd.

Have you tried mounting the ISO in loopback mode?

Greg
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