We need to upgrade OS on an old machine with only floppy drive and USB sockets. It came with its own Redhat operating system.

How can we wipe off everything on the hard disk and re-install Linux ES, since it does not have CDROM? The only way we can think of is to boot from either floppy or USB flash drive to use NFS installation.

We first tried to create a boot floppy and boot from the floppy. When we chose to use NFS for installation, we were prompted to insert a drive media disk to properly set up NFS. We inserted a floppy containing drvnet.img and continued to enter networking information. However, immediately after that, it terminated and prompted for rebooting.

Is it possible to create a bootable USB flash drive? The BOIS on the machine can be set to USB-HDD and USB-ZIP.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Here is a link to a site that goes into this creating a boot USB Flash memory stick, and how to make it work with many systems.

http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/

Good luck,

Thanks for the tips.

The USB drive is originally formatted as vfat. I used "dd" command to copy files to it. I then inserted it into the USB slot, but still the host will not recognize the device.

...checked the BIOS ?...is it a 2.0 spec port ?

Usually your bios has to support USB booting. By the sounds of it, yours does not. However, like Mandrake Move (the portable hard drive) you could use a boot floppy first to get it to see the usb pen drive, then proceed from there. Seeing how your bios probably doesn't support usb booting, your options are limited.

wtf?

If your BIOS has the option to boot from USB-HDD it more than likely has the ability to boot from the USB Flash Drive (that's my problem; the absence of the USB-HDD option on ASUS TUSI BIOSes). All you should have to do is go into BIOS configuration, choose boot options and move "USB-HDD to the top of the list (with my BIOS the "+" key moves it up) and then exit saving changes to reboot. If that doesn't work (which for all reasons it should (though computers ARE fallible)) then yes, you probably would have to boot through a floppy to detect the USB drive.

Anyway, good luck, yes ^-^

u could download it from the internet on that pc and partision ur hardrive and put it one your partision and boot from it

yay! i got it...

I don't know if RedHat supports this in the same manner SuSE does, but you should be able to drop your files onto the usb (I used a hard disk, as opposed to flash drive, though they should be essentially the same (mass storage devices)) and then insert the boot disk. Do NOT choose NFS; instead choose to boot from hard drive and choose sda (like i said, I installed SuSE so it might not work with RedHat but you can give it a try).

If sda or sda1 doesn't work (if it asks for a directory, type the directory you installed it in; probably "/"), you may be able to leave it blank so it can search all hd.

Again, it worked with SuSE (which I am loving so far) so good luck on RedHat ^-^;;