How to create and use Live USB - Fedora 11 / Fedora 12

How to Make a bootable USB Drive to Install Fedora 11/ Fedora 12 instead of using a physical DVD

Why would I want to make a usbkey installer from the DVD instead of the LiveCD?

If you are installing to a netbook, or otherwise do not have an optical drive (or burner, or media), and you want the extra flexibility of using the regular DVD installer instead of the Live image, then this method will give a useful install medium. You are then free to customize package selection, choose which filesystem you prefer for your rootfs (ext3 OR ext4, btrfs, etc), and rescue mode is available.

Preparing the usbkey

The easiest setup method is to install and use unetbootin, since Fedora's own liveusb-creator and livecd-tools' livecd-iso-to-disk.sh (except for an unofficial patched version) currently do not support putting the DVD installer on USB.

The manual setup method follows:

Firstly download the iso file Fedora-11/12-i386/x86_64-DVD.iso () from a Fedora mirror. Then loop mount the iso on a local mount point such as /mnt/tmp

# mount -o loop /path-to-iso/Fedora-11/12-i386/x86_64-DVD.iso /mnt/tmp

Now plug in the usbkey and then copy the main iso file as well as the images directory from the /mnt/tmp/ directory to the root directory of the usbkey.

# cp /path-to-iso/Fedora-11/12-i386/x86_64-DVD.iso /media/usbdisk/<br /># cp -r /mnt/tmp/images /media/usbdisk/<br />

Next download the boot.iso file from a rawhide mirror from the development/i386/os/images/ directory on the mirror and store it on your computer's hard drive.

From your running F11/F12 system (including an F11/F12 livecd) make sure you have the livecd-tools package installed by doing:

yum install livecd-tools 

Use the "mount" command to find where the usbkey is (e.g. /dev/sdb1) or look at /var/log/messages to find where the key was mounted. Next umount the usbkey either from the desktop icon or using the umount command - but keep a note of where the usbkey is e.g. /dev/sdb1

Now as root run:

# livecd-iso-to-disk path-to/boot.iso /dev/sdb1 

If the key is not bootable then refer to the information below to make it bootable otherwise this command will fail.

Now you should have a bootable usbkey which will run an F11/F12 install. When you boot the key select a hard drive install and select the drive as /dev/sdb1 (or your usbkey drive) and the path should be /

The remainder of the install should be the same as for using a DVD in an optical drive, but when you select options make sure that you select your disk partitioning carefully if you are doing custom partitioning and also make sure that the bootloader is installed on the correct drive (by default it will be installed on the usbkey so you will need to change it to the master boot record on the hard drive.