Sep 20 2006

Installing CentOS On An External USB Drive

Published by tim at 10:30 am under coding

I decided to get a dedicated server for my project and passion of the moment (more on that later, maybe). As a result, I wanted to set up a CentOS installation so that I could work out all the bugs before uploading. Unfortunately, it turns out that getting CentOS working on a USB drive is not as easy as, say, Ubuntu or Slax, and it took some googling before I got it to work.

Installing CentOS To An External USB Drive

  1. When you boot CentOS and get to the initial screen, type “linux expert”. This will enable you to format/partition your external USB drive.
  2. When you reboot, reboot to the CentOS CD AGAIN and type “linux rescue”. This (should) mount your USB drive.[1]
  3. Navigate to the /boot directory of your USB drive and rebuild the initrd for USB support with:
    mkinitrd –with-usb –preload=ehci-hcd –preload=usb-storage –preload=scsi_mod –preload=sd_mod ./usbinitrd-X.X.XX-X.XXXX_LLL X.X.XX-X.XXXX_LLL

    . The right X.X.XX-X.XXXX_LLL codes can be seen under /lib/modules, just choose the appropriate one.[2]

  4. Change your grub configuration to point to your new USB initrd.

Voila! CentOS goodness on an external USB drive.

[1]If your drive isn’t automatically mounted (or the wrong one is mounted), do a
mkdir /mnt/usb; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb

, substituting the appropriate device for /dev/sda1.
[2]See this forum thread for more details
[3]Simon’s guide to USB booting is the canonical guide for RH

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One Response to “Installing CentOS On An External USB Drive”

  1. # ???? » Blog Archive » ??centos???????on 07 Nov 2007 at 7:50 pm

    [...] ???Installing CentOS On An External USB Drive????????????????????! [...]

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