Unable to copy boot img file & boot from USB thumb drive.

[rockinrube]

Hello. I need some help with installing Red hat to my laptop. I’m a newbie and I’m going through an older Linux book (3rd edition) by QUE publishing. It has the CD for a Red Hat version, Vanderbilt I believe.

I’m attempting to copy the CD’s boot img file to my USB thumb drive under windows XP.

I’ve tried DD for windows, Flashnul and the win32 disk imager tool without success. In all cases, I copied the image file to my profile directory and to the temp folder. I’ve tried writing to the USB from both directories. In each case, all utilities state that the write was successful. Sometimes I see bytes used under the USB properties. But most times, there’s no disk usage under the properties tab.

Upon booting with the USB, I get 1’s and 0’s streaming across the screen. Below you’ll find the syntax of my commands. I know the system is USB bootable as I can boot into dos using the same USB thumb drive.

I’ve formatted the USB with FAT and FAT32 using the HP USB format tool. Is there a particular file system that I should use for this sort of boot up?

Please help. I’d really like to learn how to install Linux from scratch before I move to the GUI versions or live CD’s\USB’s. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do this. I just haven’t found it on the net yet. Any help would be appreciated.

Flashnul

C:\flashnul\flashnul-1rc1>flashnul 1 -L "c:\documents and settings\ruben\my docu
ments\boot.img"

Disk PhysicalDrive1 (UNC name: \\.\PhysicalDrive1)
------------------------------------------------------------[Drive geometry]--
Cylinders/heads/sectors = 249/255/63
Bytes per sector = 512
CHS size = 2048094720 (1953 Mb)
---------------------------------------------------------------[Device size]--
Device size = 2055208960 (1960 Mb)
delta to near power of 2 = 92274688 (88 Mb), 4%
Surplus size = 7114240 (6947 kb)
-----------------------------------------------[Adapter & Device properties]--
Bus type = (7) USB
Removable device = Yes
Command Queue = Unsupported
Device vendor = Kingston
Device name = DataTraveler 2.0
Revision = PMAP
--------------------------------------------------------------[Hotplug info]--
Device hotplug = Yes
Media hotplug = No

Selected operation: load file content
Selected drive: PhysicalDrive1, 2055208960b (1960 Mb)

THIS OPERATION IS DESTRUCTIVE!!!
Type 'yes' to confirm operation. All other text will stop it.

Really destroy data on drive PhysicalDrive1? :yes

-----------------------------------------------------------------------[Log]--
Runing operation [load file content] for drive PhysicalDrive1

Writing 0x110000 (1152 kb), 1224607 b/s
image load finished

----------------------------------------------------------[Operation result]--
passes: 1
errors: 0
write bytes: 1474560 (1440 kb)
avg. write speed: 1498397 (1463 kb/s)
max/min write speed: 0 (0 b/s) / 0 (0 b/s)


Press ENTER to exit.


DD for windows

C:\dd for Windows>dd if=c:\temp\boot.img of=\\.\f:
rawwrite dd for windows version 0.5.
This program is covered by the GPL. See copying.txt for details
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out

[Rubberman]

Can I ask why you are going thru such contortions to do this? There are a number of easier ways to make a bootable/installable thumb drive for RHEL/CentOS and other distributions. Also, RHEL is not a really good choice for current laptops since it doesn't support as much hardware as a more current distribution, such as Ubuntu, will.

[rockinrube]

I wanted to go through an old school installation instead of a live boot install. But I have used the unetbootin tool and have been able to boot into linux (Fedora).

But I'd still like to install a version on my laptop's hdisk to simply complete the study guide. It's a Dell Lattitude D630 with 2 gb memory. should be enough to handle any and all. I want a version that's used in corporate industry's as my goal is to add linux administration to my current windows administration experience.

Can you suggest a version and install process that mimic's what is used in the real world?

Thanks..

[Rubberman]

I have a D630 and am happily running Ubuntu 9.04 on it. All the hardware in the system (including bluetooth) works without any problems at all, and even add-in hardware such as my Sprint USB modem, brand-x webcam, and pcmcia esata card worked out-of-the-box. It sleeps, hibernates, and generally works without any problems at all.