Hey guys, here is the scoop, I have just been given a few mini-box's to stage a working OS on. They will boot off a compact flash and have an internal IDE drive. I need to setup that compact flash to boot into a live image perhaps and opt to install to the local internal.

I tried using the http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo as if it was a USB keychain but got a Invalid System Disk, so at a stuck point. Someone mentioned mounting the flash (which works fine) to my machine and doing a dd (never used) but any advice would be helpful.

Lr

If the flash drive is big enough to hold the iso image, yeah, simply do a dd to the flash drive from the iso file and boot to install. Done it myself for Red Hat/CentOS installs and kickstarts.

Cool, thanks. The Fedora live CD is around 700mb and the flash is 1gb so space is not an issue. Only help I would need is the dd as I am not familiar with that command ( I will google as it downloads the CD). Do I dd the .iso, or extract and dd, etc. I know it must be bootable so not sure how to make that work (unless the dd handles that also) .

Thanks again.

lr

dd will actually take care of it for you if it's an iso, or img file.

dd if=nameof.iso of=/dev/sda

Just dump to the raw device without partitioning the flash drive, etc.

Thanks, but no good. Actually odd. I used the above method after downloading the Fedora-8-Live-i686.iso and issuing the dd command, after a few minutes I get the confirmation

dd if=Fedora-8-Live-i686.iso of=/dev/sdg
1427904+0 records in
1427904+0 records out
731086848 bytes (731 MB) copied, 350.978 s, 2.1 MB/s

After removing and booting off that I get;
Boot Failure
Rebooot and Select propoer Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device.

Then if I use another flash device and issue
dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdg
24576+0 records in
24576+0 records out
12582912 bytes (13 MB) copied, 6.50159 s, 1.9 MB/s

Reboot on that, I get the welcome to Fedora start page with the install option, but since there is no other data on there, I can't do anything more than select english. So the problem lies in the Live iso, it confirmed it copied the 731mb but some reason it doesn't boot off it!

Very very odd!

Hmm, I've seen some hardware do this before where it just complains. If you have another machine with space and network connectivity, you can actually mount the iso as a loopback on it, configure apache on it and just kickstart with the bootdisk.img you created as you can pass the "linux ks=http://server/kickstart/ks.cfg"