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RHEL 5.2 USB install questions

Hi All,

I have a challenging situation. I wish to install RHEL 5.2 on a server which does not have a floppy/cd/dvd drive. Thus I am trying to install from a USB drive. Also, I do not have a Linux machine to follow the instructions on previous threads on how to make the USB bootable. I have a Mac and Windows machine and I am trying to get the necessary files onto the USB. I have dd (disk duplicated) the diskboot.img onto the USB. When I run fdisk I have one partition with the diskboot.img stuff on it and it is marked as active. However, my Mac disk utility tool still says the drive is not bootable. So here are my questions:

1) is there some unix like command I can use on my Mac to make the disk bootable? Or does anyone know how I might make it bootable? It seems like there must be some simple way to do this.

2) Now that I have the contents of diskboot.img on the USB drive do I just copy the rest of the RHEL 5.2 DVD contents onto the USB drive? I'm just wondering how this part works. The contents of diskboot.img should boot up linux, but do I have to do something special (make particular directories on the USB) so that the remainder of the files on the RHEL 5.2 DVD will be found?

Thanks in advance

does the windows machine have a cd writer. could you burn a live cd and create the usb installer with the live-linux machine

Sorry I don't understand. I downloaded RHEL 5.2 and burned it to a DVD on my Mac. What is meant by "live cd"? Does that mean bootable? If so, than what you are driving at is making a bootable CD and copying it to the USB and the bootable attribute would be retained and transferred to the USB? Sorry for the basic questions.

Why not just dd the entire DVD content to USB?

Or you can dd DVD content to .ISO (for Windows) and go with instruction in www.pendrivelinux.com. Each distro has different instruction to install.

Quote:

Originally Posted by diddler (Post 3733220)

i must've misunderstood. i thought the brickwall you hit was that you dont have a linux machine to run the commands needed to create the install usb.
a live cd would allow you to have a temporary linux computer to run your needed commands.

Oh, I see. I'll look into the live CD route then. You are correct I don't have a linux box to run the appropriate commands on. I thought by just getting the diskboot.img info and the rest of the RHEL 5.2 files on the USB was going to be enough... if I could somehow make it bootable.

fyi, i'm using fc-11 live-usb:

Code:

[liveuser@localhost ~]$ sudo fdisk -l



Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0xb878336a



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sda1  *          1      14593  117218241    7  HPFS/NTFS



Disk /dev/sdb: 8021 MB, 8021606400 bytes

124 heads, 62 sectors/track, 2037 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 7688 * 512 = 3936256 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x0007674a



  Device Boot      Start        End      Blocks  Id  System

/dev/sdb1  *          1        1022    3928537  83  Linux

/dev/sdb2            1023        2037    3901660  83  Linux



Disk /dev/dm-0: 3221 MB, 3221225472 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 391 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x00000000



Disk /dev/dm-0 doesn't contain a valid partition table



Disk /dev/dm-1: 3221 MB, 3221225472 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 391 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Disk identifier: 0x00000000



Disk /dev/dm-1 doesn't contain a valid partition table

Thanks for all your replies. It occured to me the easiest thing would be to install a RHEL virtual machine on my Mac and follow one of the threads on how to make the USB a bootable drive.