Bootable USB Media Notes Revision as of Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 19:56 UTC
Assume that your USB disk’s drive letter is D:
CentOS/Fedora Bootable Installation Key
- Clear all partitions with
fdisk - Create a 100M primary, bootable (‘a’ key), FAT (’t’ and then ‘b’)
partition - Then create another primary partition to fill up the rest of the
space - Write changes and then issue:
mkfs -t vfat /dev/
mkfs /dev/
- Install
livecd-tools - Run it:
livecd-iso-to-disk /full/path/to/CentOS_image.iso /dev/
- Mount the Linux partition and copy the ISO file
- You’re set. Thanks,
brah.
On Windows
Step 1 : Use diskpart to create bootable media
diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
For the step highlighted above, use list disk to make sure that your
USB stick is, indeed, disk 1. At this point, the USB stick has a
primary partition and should be bootable. However, it doesn’t have
anything to boot per se.
Step 2 : Use xcopy to copy over the files to be booted
From the directory containing the boot files (these could be Windows
installation files, for example), issue:
xcopy *.* /s/e/f D:\
Where D: is the drive letter of your USB stick. Et voila! Install
away!
Other notes and resources
- Unetbootin is a great tool for
bootable USB on Windows and Linux (GUI only)- The LiveUSB Creator
is another option.
- The LiveUSB Creator
- Hiren’s Boot CD remains my favorite
tool for all sorts of diagnostics- Also has a dandy USB formatting
tool
- Also has a dandy USB formatting
- Linux distros like Knoppix might also be
useful for this purpose- Other elaborate
resources
also exist!
- Other elaborate
- An excellent idea would be to roll everything into one using
GRUB