Creating a Fedora Boot CD

[achaudhary]

Hello:
I'd like to know if there are instructions anywhere for taking a Fedora installation on an external (USB) drive, and booting it from a boot CD. Basically, my BIOS does not allow booting from the USB drive, and I'm currently not able to create a /boot partition or install GRUB anywhere on my internal drive.
In theory, as I was able to install FC6 onto the external USB drive (Anaconda sensed external storage was connected and loaded USB storage drivers; I was then able to use Anaconda's partitioning tools and installed straight on there; however, I had to install GRUB onto the external drive as well, which my BIOS can't see).
So I basically need a boot CD that will use the installed FC6 kernel; an initrd with the proper USB storage drivers; and mount the root filesystem from a USB drive. As far as I can tell, this is not a problem given the current technical capability of Linux in general, and certainly not FC6. I have access to the FC6 installation on the external HD through the FC6 install DVD's rescue mode. There are FAT partitions available which I can use to store a generated boot CD image and burn it from Windows; I know I can access these FAT drives from rescue mode too.
Any instructions or pointers to something posted somewhere, would be nice. I don't need / want a Live CD.

[Dies]

Not sure if this will work since I don't have way to try it right now, but my theory starts at post #22:

http://forum.fedoraforum.org/forum/s...3&page=2&pp=15

If you have a floppy drive testing it out shouldn't take more than a than few minutes and if it does you can always make a grub CD.

[Seve]

Hello:
There is a how-to located here that should help you:
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...&highlight=USB

Edit:
Sorry Dies ... didn't mean to post over .... lag I guess
Hopefully not too much overlap.

Seve

[Dies]

No, no that's great other people were asking the same thing I wish you had been around sooner.

[achaudhary]

Seve:
Well, I tried your instructions. First off, I'm assuming the result of the line:
root="$(mount | grep "/" | awk '{printf $1}')"
is to replace the $root variable in the next line that sets up isolinux.cfg, with the name of the root block device, correct? Like, in my case:
/dev/sdc3
Because I was getting this output instead to $root:
/dev/sdc3procsysfs/dev/sysfs
Or something close to that. It was adding stuff after the root block device, from the rest of 'mount' command's output, without spaces. That didn't seem right; I think I was right to manually put /dev/sdc3 in the echo statement. Was I right?
If I was right, then here's the problem. I boot from the CD created with the image made from those instructions... But the kernel panics after it's unable to mount "/dev/root"... Is that something new in FC5/6? That the kernel creates a device /dev/root pointing to whatever block device is actually the root filesystem? Because I can verify that isolinux.cfg on the CD says root=/dev/sdc3. And that is also the location where the Fedora rescue mode finds my current FC6 installation... It's all on one partition, so it's not like I'm confusing / and /boot. What little I can read of the kernel output as the kernel loads from the boot CD suggests that USB drivers load properly and /dev/sdc is found.
Ideas? I don't have a floppy drive, so I can't really try the LILO instructions given by Dies.

[platomxv]

I am writing this on a computer running FC66 booted from a CD created with the linux command mkbootdisk. (See mkbootdisk --help or man mkbootdisk.) Here is how I created the CD. In my case, I have both a computer capable of booting from a USB, but you say you can boot your FC6 via the installation disk and 'linux rescue'. Since mkbootdisk creates a boot image specific to the kernel with which it is created, you need to have FC6 running on your computer, type in

uname -r

which will tell you the kernel version.

Then key the command

mkbootdisk --iso --device=bootdisk.iso --version=[kernel-version shown by 'uname -r]

This will create a bootdisk-iso-image in your root directory with the name "bootdisk.iso". I then used k3b to write the iso image to a CD. I have been using the boot disk created via this procedure for 10 days now.

Norm