Greetings, CenOS forum peeps!

I've spent two days running attempting to create a startup USB that will work on my new shiny Aspire Revo 3700, unfortunately with not a lot of luck. Basically, I started by following the guide under http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey, however encountered various problems including that 10meg isn't large enough to fit the isolinux directory, that the system (which comes installed with Linpus Linux) isn't able to run 'syslinux -i', and that I'm not clear on what to put in the grub.conf file the author advises me to create.

In any case, I have now made a small amount of progress by following the guide available at http://blog.chenhow.net/2010/07/23/linux/create-bootable-usb-drive-for-centos-installation-2/. The guide follows roughly the CentOS Wiki's suggestions on partitioning, below is the gist:

-create a fat32 partition (~200meg, /dev/sdb1 in my case) and an ext3 partition (the remainder, /dev/sdb2)
-add boot flag to fat32 partition
-create filesystems using mkdosfs and mkfs
-cp -R everything from the ISO image's 'isolinux' directory (which I had mounted to /media/DVD) onto the fat32 partition and rename the isolinux.cfg file within to syslinux.cfg
-run 'syslinux /dev/sdb1'
-mount /dev/sdb1 to /media/USB and run 'grub-install --root-directory=/media/USB /dev/sdb, end result of which was:
(fd0) /dev/fd0
(hd0) /dev/sda
(hd1) /dev/sdb
-amend grub.conf file as per instructions

I am now able to boot from the USB drive, which is great - however, the guide does not cover what to do with the ISO image. When attempting to install using the USB drive without doing anything else (e.g. with no .iso or content thereof present) the installer gets past the selection of language and keyboard layout, arriving at the request for the "installation image", which on the next page is revealed as 'install.img'. I have noticed this file in the 'images' directory of the ISO, so mounted the ISO and copied the contents to the ext3 partition on the USB drive, booted from it, got to that stage and when it asks for the directory where the file is present, I opted for F2 to select the location manually. However, when I select the location containing the images file, the installation fails with "Install exited abnormally 1 1".

Has anyone experienced this problem, and if so, how was it eventually resolved? Thanks all!

Please note: I have attempted to attach the getinfo.sh script data, however I am getting the following error: "Failed opening directory with write permission: /var/www/html/oldwebcopy.centos.org/uploads/newbb"

Therefore, please find pasted below some possibly relevant info:

Please review Readme First to see why your upload failed and what to do about it.


Not sure exactly where you are going wrong, but you essentially want to do a Hard Drive Installation with the ISO image on /dev/sdb2.

Hi there,

Thanks for that - sorry, hadn't seen the bit about attachments! For future ref, the output from './getinfo.sh disk' can now be found under http://pastebin.centos.org/38428.

In any case, good news: the bootable USB drive is finally working! Used a slightly larger USB drive this time but otherwise set it up in the same way:

- downloaded CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD1.iso and CentOS-6.2-i386-bin-DVD2.iso from MirrorService.org
- made USB bootable and installed Linux on the FAT32 partition following Chenhow.net's guide - initially I forgot to run 'syslinux /dev/sdb1', which resulted in error 'kernel /vmlinuz - 15: file not found'
- set up the ext3 partition for a hard drive installation (thanks pschaff!), where as per instructions there I found that I had to remove all files aside from install.img to allow it to work; I also moved both DVD1 and DVD2 to the ext3 partition - not sure however if this was necessary or if only DVD1 is needed
- during install, when installer was looking for install.img, I first of all kept in mind that sda and sdb were swapped round (because of boot order maybe?) and simply selected sda - this time it was found without pointing to the directory, and I did not get an 'installer exited abnormally 1.1" this time; GUI started and I was a very happy suaswe indeed!

Cheers all.

PS. I can only see an option to type "Solved" in this reply - is that how a thread is marked solved?

Yes - per Readme First Section 13. Marking the topic appropriately.