Installing from USB Hard Drive

Hi,

I am trying to install openSUSE-11.1 i586 on my HP Compaq nc4200 laptop and I am having some issues.

First of all my laptop does not have a CD/DVD Drive so I have had to use an external USB hard drive. I used unetbootin to make the USB drive bootable but when I selected the USB Hard Drive in my laptop’s BIOS and booted into it I received the error message: “remove disks or other media press any key to restart”. According to the Microsoft website this means that the device does not contain boot files. Please help me with this I am my wit’s end. If it helps, the USB hard drive has two partitions and I am working from a windows machine.

Do you have the option of installing from a USB ‘stick’ (thumb drive)? It might well be easier.

You can just install the Live image onto one directly with unetbootin, and it should work (there are at least a couple of workarounds if it doesn’t).

If you’re hankering for the DVD version, I know you can install the DVD image onto a USB stick with unetbootin, run it, and point it to the DVD iso on a hard drive - it doesn’t actually recognise that it ‘contains’ the repository, for some reason. I think you can also use the net installer image on a USB stick for this, though I’ve no personal experience doing it.

Thanks, I’m going to use unetbootin now with a live CD iso and try to boot from it on the laptop and see if i can install it that way. Will unetbootin do everything for me or do I have to do anything else.

That should - in theory - work as it is. I’ve heard it said that some people have had better luck downloading the ISO from within unetbootin, rather than downloading it separately, but I don’t know about that.

Try it with the ISO you have, and see what happens.

If it doesn’t work, you’ll find a file in the root directory of the stick called config.isoclient. Delete this file, and make a copy of config.gnome.isoclient or config.kde.isoclient (depending on whether you’re using gnome or KDE), and rename the copy config.isoclient.

That worked for me - but as I said, you may be able to just install it straight with unetbootin. It seems to depend on hardware…

Let me know how you get on.

This was exactly what I was looking for in doing a search for USB install. One quick question since I am not familiar with it: Unetbootin- Is this a package to install with a UI or a command from terminal? Also, can the USB be FAT or does it need to be another format?

It’s cross platform, GUI driven (although it might have a CLI implementation too, couldn’t tell you), so you can get it here,

Software.openSUSE.org

Or for Windows here

UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads

I’m not too sure about the filesystem. I believe it will format it to fat of its own accord in the process, if it isn’t formatted such already - but if it is, it won’t format it, so it’s non-destructive unless there’s a file of the same name there already.

Don’t quote me on that - safest to use a USB with one partition, and nothing you desire to keep. Any other schemes may work… but they may not…