[ale] Fedora NetInstall via USB Drive?

[scott mcbrien]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Marc Ferguson <marcferguson at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hey Folks,
>
> I'm looking for a howto or some information on doing a NetInstall of Fedora
> using a USB drive.  Call me crazy, but I'm getting tired of burning DVDs -
> only to have them sit and stale in a spindle.  So; I did a NetInstall of
> Fedora 10 x86_64 (when it came out) and I loved the process.  I don't
> remember the LONG URL the guy from the IRC channel gave me.
>
> I think I need to download and then copy n paste a .img file to my USB
> drive and I should be good to go.  If that's not the process then please
> help.  Thanks.
>
> --
> Marc F.


Marc,
If it's just using the USB drive to access the second stage of the
installer, you cat or dd the efidisk.img file from the install media to your
USB drive.  Once you boot off of the drive, it'll ask you the type of
install you want, you can select http, ftp, or NFS.  A local mirror is:
x86 -
http://mirror.newnanutilities.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/
x86_64 -
http://mirror.newnanutilities.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/x86_64/os/


The process looks something like:
(1) Download the Fedora DVD image
(2) mount the Fedora DVD image using -o loop option with mount
(3) Lets assume in the previous step you used /mnt as your mountpoint for
the image.  cat /mnt/images/efidisk.img > /dev/sdX  where X is the letter of
your USB disk.
(4) Boot your target machine off of the USB disk you've made
(5) Choose FTP or HTTP as your install type, and put in the network details
to reach your installation source (a machine with the Fedora and images
directories copied from the Fedora install DVD, the shared via NFS, FTP, or
HTTP)

Don't want to download the whole DVD?  Replace steps 1 and 2 with download:
http://mirror.newnanutilities.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/images/efidisk.img
Then step 3 is catting this file out to your USB disk.

Alternatively, depending on the size of your USB disk, you can put all the
installation stuff you need on the USB stick, needs about 4GiB.  You create
2 partitions on the USB stick, for the first 21MiB in size, you follow the
proceedure above for writing the efidisk.img file to it, but now instead of
/dev/sdX it's /dev/sdX1.  For the second partition, you format it with a
filesystem and put your Fedora DVD image on it, the single file.  I did this
with an 8GiB stick, so space was less of an issue, with a 4GiB stick, you
may need to optimize the filesystem format, maybe something like:
mke2fs -N 500 -b 4096 /dev/sdX2
This will give you 500 inodes, instead of the default 1 inode/ 1KiB of space
and should cut down on the overhead you lose to file pointers.  The downside
is that you'd only be able to store 500 files,directories, and symlinks.
Assuming everything fits on the USB stick, you can do a "Hard Drive"
install, point the installer source at the second partition on your USB
drive, and go to town.

-Scott
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