Install RHEL 6.4 from usb drive? Possible?

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Downloaded complete install DVD ISO fir 6.4 and burned to USB (as per instructions for 7.1). No DVD drive on this server.

Boots ok, asks me for location (no option for USB so I select hard drive), so I select /dev/sda. Goes though location, hostname etc but then fails with error

"The installer has tried to mount image #1 but cannot find it on the hard drive. Please copy this image to the drive and click retry".

Is it even possible to install 6.4 this way from USB?

Or is it best if I get portable DVD drive put image on there, boot from usb (as I've done) but select DVD drive as install?

Responses

Hello,
You can either do what you suggested in the last sentence - get a portable DVD drive and use it as a package source.
Alternatively, you can do this with two USB drives: one drive to boot, and a second one as a package source.

You already have the boot drive; you can reuse it, or you can grab the boot.iso image from Downloads here on the Portal. You don't need the full binary DVD image on this drive, since you'll be installing packages from the second one.

For the installation source, you'll need the full DVD ISO image. The RHEL6 Installation Guide describes the procedure - in short, you need to copy the whole installation ISO to the root of the source drive, and you need to extract the images/ directory from the ISO and copy it to the same drive, outside the image itself.

The structure of the source drive should look like this:

SOURCE_DRIVE
├─ images/
│   ├─ install.img
│   └─ product.img
└─ RHEL6.4-20130130.0-Server-x86_64-DVD1.iso

Once you're done, plug the boot drive into the system and boot from it. Once you get into the boot menu, plug in the second (source) drive, press Tab in the boot menu, and add repo=hd:/dev/sdb:/[1] to the command line. Then press Enter to boot; the installer will load packages from the source drive.

[1] Replace /dev/sdb with the source drive's device name. The best thing to do is to use the drive's label, e.g. repo=hd:LABEL=YOUR_LABEL_HERE:/

To save swapping USB drives out, could I do the following:-

1) Rebuild the USB bootable drive but this time just using the smaller boot.iso image.
2) Copy the full DVD iso and extract the images as above and copy this to the USB drive as well.

Would this work? Would the install then find the files on the same usb disk?

In theory it sounds like it could work. I gave it a try and didn't have much luck, but I think I ran into a different issue.

When you dd the boot image to your USB drive, it creates a partition that fits the boot ISO and leaves the rest of the device unpartitioned. You could use something like (g)parted or to create a second partition, place the binary ISO and the extracted images/ directory there, and then use repo=hd:/dev/sdb2:/ or repo=hd:LABEL=LABEL_OF_SECOND_FS:/ at the boot menu. Note the sdb2, which points to the second partition on the drive.

Anyway, on later versions of RHEL6 (6.5 and later), you should be able to just dd the full binary DVD ISO to a USB drive and it should boot and install just fine - it didn't work only on RHEL 6.3 and 6.4 due to a bug. See this solution for info.

You should be able to use livecd-iso-to-disk available from rhev/openstack repos or grab it from EPEL.

[root@seaking software]# livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --format --efi rhel-server-6.5-x86_64-dvd.iso /dev/sdb

Btw, I was able to just use dd for the same as well

 time dd if=/dev/rhel-server-6.5-x86_64-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

But livecd-iso-to-disk should be the prefered way.

If you were making a standalone automated install (i.e. embedding kickstart and other stuff)

1) loop back mount our provided iso
2) cp/sync contents
3) mkisofs

 mkisofs -o /data/software/davesrhel6u5.iso -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -J -R -V "MrDavesDisk" .

4) use livecd-iso-to-disk

livecd-iso-to-disk --reset-mbr --format --efi \
    --ks ks.cfg davesrhel6u5.iso  /dev/sdb 

Heres what worked in the end:-
1) Download both boot and full DVD isos.
2) On Windows PC, use Fedora Live USB creator to create bootable USB from boot iso.
3) Create new directory on USB called /dvd
4) Copy full DVD iso to /dvd
5) Uncompress fullDVD iso.
6) Copy images directory from extract to /dvd and delete other files in /dvd/images apart from install.img and product.img (in fact, as per Petr's drive structure listed above - just in /dvd not / of usb drive).
7) Boot from usb and allow install to start.
8) When asked for source for install, select /dev/sda but then change directory to /dvd.
9) Seems to find iso and work. So no need to swap USB drives using this method.

Glad to see you got it working. Thank you for sharing the solution!

I wrote an article on this a couple years ago.
How to prepare bootable USB media for RHEL6 using DVD isos

But of course this only works if you've got a linux/unix machine to do this on.

It is not working for me.

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