Bootable USB Media Notes Revision as of Tuesday, 3 June 2025 at 19:29 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/<FAT Partition>  
    mkfs /dev/<Linux Partition>
  

• Install livecd-tools

• Run it:

    livecd-iso-to-disk /full/path/to/CentOS_image.iso /dev/<FAT Partition>
  

• 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.
• Hiren’s Boot CD remains my favorite
  tool for all sorts of diagnostics
  • Also has a dandy USB formatting
    tool
• Linux distros like Knoppix might also be
  useful for this purpose
  • Other elaborate
    resources
    also exist!
• An excellent idea would be to roll everything into one using
  GRUB