On Friday, April 13, 2007 2:03 PM -0500 Les Mikesell
<lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to install directly from a DVD iso image downloaded to a
> USB external drive as a file on a FAT filesystem? That is, if I burn the
> boot.iso on a CD and boot it, is there any way to mount the USB drive and
> install from the DVD image file there (some target machines don't have
a
> DVD drive).
This sounds like a "hard drive installation":
<http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Installation_Guide-en-US/ch02s06.html>
The only requirement is that the installer OS be able to find the USB drive
where the ISO is located.
I actually recently attempted something similar with FC7t3, booting with
the installer on my USB memory stick, and the DVD ISO on the SATA partition
(sdb5) that I was going to target with the new OS. It hung loading RPM's
and I never found anything written to sdb5, so I suspect the install got
stuck in the disk cache. (While the installer was running, I couldn't see
any mountpoint for sdb5 either, just the mountpoint for the location of the
ISO image.)
I'm now planning to attempt something similar with Centos 5. I'll report
back how that goes. (I'm still waiting for the torrent to finish.)