Assume that your USB disk's drive letter is D:
-
Clear all partitions with
fdisk
-
Create a 100M primary, bootable ('a' key), FAT ('t' and then 'b') partition
-
Then create another primary partition to fill up the rest of the space
-
Write changes and then issue:
mkfs -t vfat /dev/<FAT Partition> mkfs /dev/<Linux Partition>
-
Install
livecd-tools
-
Run it:
livecd-iso-to-disk /full/path/to/CentOS_image.iso /dev/<FAT Partition>
-
Mount the Linux partition and copy the ISO file
-
You're set. Thanks, brah.
diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
For the step highlighted above, use list disk
to make sure that your
USB stick is, indeed, disk 1. At this point, the USB stick has a
primary partition and should be bootable. However, it doesn't have
anything to boot per se.
From the directory containing the boot files (these could be Windows installation files, for example), issue:
xcopy *.* /s/e/f D:\
Where D: is the drive letter of your USB stick. Et voila! Install away!
- Unetbootin is a great tool for
bootable USB on Windows and Linux (GUI only)
- The LiveUSB Creator is another option.
- Hiren's Boot CD remains my favorite
tool for all sorts of diagnostics
- Also has a dandy USB formatting tool
- Linux distros like Knoppix might also be
useful for this purpose
- Other elaborate resources also exist!
- An excellent idea would be to roll everything into one using GRUB