CentOS-7 On A USB Stick
I tried dd-ing the ISO onto a USB stick, as suggested in
In any case, I got it working by running livecd-iso-to-disk on a Fedora-20 laptop. I’ve found before that this is the best program around for the purpose.
But I’ve 2 queries about this:
1. Why isn’t this program available on CentOS?
2. I find it strange the using a USB stick seems to be regarded as an out-of-the-ordinary idea. Are people still burning CDs or DVDs? And if so why?
I would have thought the time had come to make USB sticks the standard installation method?
Certainly it should be treated on a par with DVDs.
I have two HP MicroServers running under CentOS, and these don’t come with a DVD drive. I assumed this was becoming more or less standard?
8 thoughts on - CentOS-7 On A USB Stick
I use multisystem – http://sourceforge.net/projects/multisystem/
So far only some *BSD iso’s have giving me any issues, but It’s all I
use now. I probably have 20-30 ISO’s on it at the moment.
Great Tool..
It’s in EPEL.
the ISOS are all ‘hybrid’ with uefi support ( ie on the iso and also has the hybrid-uefi tags ). So I’m interested to hear what else this script might have done.
I did all of my test installs from USB, so it does work.
The command is:
dd if=./.iso of=/dev/
Obviously the name would be something like:
CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-DVD.iso or CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-NetInstall.iso or any other of the isos
It is critical that the device the the device name and not a partition name. In CentOS-6, you can use “Application => System Tools => Disk Utility” to find your USB stick’s device name. For example, /dev/sdd
(device) would be used, not /dev/sdd1 (partition)
You also have to run the command as root.
So, a working command would be, as root (if your usb stick was /dev/sdd):
dd if=./CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-DVD.iso of=/dev/sdd
I have boot that exact USB stick on an older BIOS only Dell Laptop
(m4500) with no UEFI, a new Thinkpad with UEFI secure boot mode on and off, and a M5A99X EVO R2.0 motherboard with UEFI and secureboot on and off. Installs were conducted on all with no issues.
Lamar Owen wrote:
Apologies. I see now that it didn’t install for other reasons:
—————————
Johnny Hughes wrote:
I did give the command precisely as you suggest:
dd if=./CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-KdeLive.iso of=/dev/sdb
(noted at the time).
The error message when I booted with the stick said that some file was not found.
When I later ran livecd-iso-to-disk (under Fedora-20)
I got a message that the USB partition had to be FAT formatted. I changed the partition type to FAT (hex 6) and it worked fine. So conceivably this was the reason why the dd-boot did not work. But I have had failure with ISOs installed with dd before (not CentOS).
Timothy Murphy wrote:
I see on googling that this was a problem with the epel repository. I’m not sure if I installed the CentOS-7 version by mistake, while I am currently running CentOS-6.5.
(I’m upgrading to CentOS-7 bit-by-bit, hence the error.)
On running
sudo rm -rf /etc/yum.repos.d/epel*
I was able to run yum normally.
I just tried the USB stick method, using the CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Everything.iso as the media. The command line I
used to copy the iso to the stick was:
ddrescue –force CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Everything.iso /dev/sdb
where /dev/sdb is my USB stick. I use ddrescue simply because it tends to be faster than dd for large images and it gives a progress display
(and it’s in the repos for CentOS 6).
The stick booted just fine into the installer, and while I did the media verification step I did not proceed to install (it was just a test boot).
The USB stick involved is a low-end PNY 8GB stick, and here is the lsusb
-v output:
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 154b:007a PNY
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
idVendor 0x154b PNY
idProduct 0x007a
bcdDevice 11.00
iManufacturer 1 PNY Technologies
iProduct 2 USB 2.0 FD
iSerial 3 AA00000000009494
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 32
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 0
bmAttributes 0x80
(Bus Powered)
MaxPower 500mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 2
bInterfaceClass 8 Mass Storage
bInterfaceSubClass 6 SCSI
bInterfaceProtocol 80 Bulk-Only
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x81 EP 1 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 255
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x02 EP 2 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes
bInterval 255
Device Qualifier (for other device speed):
bLength 10
bDescriptorType 6
bcdUSB 2.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 64
bNumConfigurations 1
Device Status: 0x0000
(Bus Powered)