[NTLUG:Discuss] Booting FC7/8 from USB thumbdrive

[Robert Citek]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 11:18 PM, Leroy Tennison
<leroy_tennison at prodigy.net> wrote:
> Robert Citek wrote:
>  >  Has anyone here successfully booted Fedora Core 7or Fedora Core 8
>  > from a USB thumbdrive?
>
>  First, is the partition on the thumb drive labeled '1' (without quotes)?
>   The reason I ask is that I just don't know what gets copied with a
>  partition image.

The way I image the partition, everything gets copied, including the
partition label:

dd if=/dev/sda1  of=fc7.img bs=16k

<other good suggestions elided>

>  Other things which might give some clues are what does get mounted
>  before the kernel panic and what the kernel panic message is.

Anyone know how to save boot-up messages if the kernel panics during
boot?  I'm thinking there might be a kernel option to boot into a
minimal shell or something similar to what one can do in Knoppix.

BTW, my question is more of a "can FC7 boot from an external USB
drive?" just to see if I'm overlooking something obvious.  From my
googling and responses here and other forums the answer seems to be 1)
yes, it can be done and 2) no, it's not trivial.  One has to use a
rescue CD, recreate an initrd with USB support built-in, and save that
to the USB drive.  That's more work than I want to do for an idle
curiosity.

>  If/when you get resolution please share with the rest of us.  I'm
>  thinking about imaging my root partition, wiping the drive and
>  installing CentOS 5.1.  I really don't need to have these kinds of
>  problems if i went to restore...

CentOS 5.1 is a different beast.  That works great.  Here's how I did that:

1) install to internal drive (/dev/hda)
2) after install, remove HDD and assemble drive in USB enclosure
3) boot aother machine from external USB drive

I actually do a few more steps for cloning the OS to another external
USB drive or thumbdrive.  But the point is that Ubuntu and CentOS work
great for booting from external USB drives.  Unfortunately, that same
3-step process does not appear to work for FC7 nor FC8.

Regards,
- Robert