How to install fedora 12 from usb drive?

If you don't have a CD-ROM, DVD drive and want to install fedora 12 then here are some easy steps you need to follow. Most of the netbooks come without optical drives which can be challenging to install an operating system on them. If you don't have an external CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive then booting from an usb stick would be your best solution.

Here I am going to show you how easy it is to install an Operating System(OS) from a usb drive. As fedora is my best choice of OS, I am going to show you how to install(Fedora 12) using a pen drive. All you need to do is follow these simple steps.


1) Download Fedora 12 DVD image

First of all you need to download an ISO image depending on you system architecture, Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso or Fedora-12-x86_64-DVD.iso.

(* If you already have the image you can skip this process)


2) Download Fedora 12 live cd iso image

Download live cd image depending on you system architecture, Fedora-12-i386-netinst.iso or Fedora-12-x86_64-netinst.iso.

3) Create a single ext3 bootable partition on the usb drive. You can use gparted or command line to do this task. I used command line, so here are the steps to create a partition on the usb disk(For Newbie).


$ sudo su - Switch to root
# fdisk /dev/sdb (Here sdb is the device name of your usb drive)
(Here: 'd' to delete the existing partition
'n' to create a partition
'a' to mark the partition as bootable
'w' write table to disk and exit)
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 Fromat the partition with ext3 filesystem


4) Install Fedora-12-i386-netinst.iso in USB disk.

# livecd-iso-to-disk /path/to/Fedora-12-i386-netinst.iso /dev/sdb1


( *Note: --reset-mbr flag should be added to the livecd-iso-to-disk command line for some machine to boot from usb stick.)


5) Mount the Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso image and copy the images/ folder to your usb stick.

# mkdir /mnt/dvd-image
# mount -t iso9660 /path/to/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/dvd-image -o loop
# mkdir /mnt/usb-drive
# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb-drive
# cp -rp /mnt/dvd-image/images /mnt/usb-drive
# umount /mnt/dvd-image

6) Copy DVD iso image to the USB drive

# cp /path/to/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso /mnt/usb-drive
# umount /mnt/usb-drive

7) Reboot the system with USB drive.


Thanks