Hello,

Has anyone been able to install CentOS on a USB flash memory ?

When I try, it starts booting but stops on the way.
I must not be giving the right parameters to the kernel.

If someone has been successful, please let me know how you do.

Thanks for any help.

This is written for Scientific Linux's (another RHEL "clone") LiveCD on USB, but should also work for the CentOS Live CD;

http://linux.web.psi.ch/livecd/usbdisk.html

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately it does not help me much. I already have Scientific Linux installed on a USB key. The parameters passed to the kernel are not the same and I do not see any indication telling me how to congigure menu.lst(or GRUB) or isolinux.cfg (or whatever similar file) for CentOS on a USB stick. I think this is what I need to know. At this point, I just copied the parameters from the config file on the liveCD; but this is probably not the right thing to do.

I've had really bad luck using syslinux to boot from usb drives. Grub was much more reliable, although more difficult to setup.

grub-install --recheck /dev/sd? --root-directory=/boot/place_for_files

you will then need to point grub to the kernel and initrd using the grub.conf file in the /boot/folder. I copied the contents of my /boot folder from fedora into the /boot folder on the usb key. after tuning up the grub.conf file it worked. You may need to play around with the root (hd0,0) or root (hd1,0) to get the key to work, as it seems like the bios changed the drive orders based on whether the key is plugged in as boot time. Anyway - it was way more reliable than syslinux.