Bootable USB Media Notes Revision as of Monday, 21 December 2015 at 02:30 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.
• 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