Installing Fedora 9 from a (small) USB stick

With the release of Fedora 9, anaconda has introduced a new consolidated boot image:

"Consolidated network booting ISO image, replacing old boot.iso, diskboot.img, and rescuecd.iso."

The problem with this approach is, that the 12MB diskboot.img file has disappeared, which could be used to boot a system with a small USB stick. Awesome! Thank you very much. ∗facepalm.jpg∗

But luckily, it is not very hard to recreate this file on the shell and write it onto an USB stick afterwards. This serves as another installment of my small article series announced earlier.

I started with the boot.iso image which I downloaded from http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso and loopback mounted on /mnt:

[root@localhost ~]# wget -q -c
http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/images/boot.iso
[root@localhost ~]# mount boot.iso /mnt -o loop,ro
[root@localhost NotBackedUp]# ls /mnt/
images  isolinux
[root@localhost NotBackedUp]# 

Now the steps to create the USB pendrive image are quite simple. A file is created, formatted and made bootable with syslinux and the appropriate files from the boot.iso are copied over:

[root@localhost ~]# cd /tmp/
[root@localhost tmp]# mkdir pendrive
[root@localhost tmp]# cd pendrive/
[root@localhost pendrive]# dd if=/dev/zero of=diskboot.img bs=1M count=12
12+0 records in
12+0 records out
12582912 bytes (13 MB) copied, 0.0433931 seconds, 290 MB/s
[root@localhost pendrive]# mkdosfs diskboot.img 
mkdosfs 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)
[root@localhost pendrive]# syslinux diskboot.img 
[root@localhost pendrive]# mkdir mount
[root@localhost pendrive]# mount diskboot.img mount/ -o loop
[root@localhost pendrive]# cp -r /mnt/isolinux/∗ mount/
[root@localhost pendrive]# grep -v local mount/isolinux.cfg > mount/syslinux.cfg
[root@localhost pendrive]# rm -f mount/isolinux.∗
[root@localhost pendrive]# umount -f mount
[root@localhost pendrive]# rm -rf mount/
[root@localhost pendrive]# cd
[root@localhost ~]# umount -f /mnt
[root@localhost ~]#

After these steps, a diskboot.img file is located in /tmp/pendrive. This file can be written to an USB stick with a command such as dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdb. Special care should be taken to write to the correct device (/dev/sdb in this case)and _not_ overwrite one of your own harddrives.