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Creating SLES 11 USB install media

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After having reviewed openSUSE 11.2 for my Acer Aspire Revo (which b.t.w. runs great on this box!), I've decided to go for SLES 11 due to having two applications that don't run stably (yet) on 11.2.

To my surprise SLES 11 supports the Acer's hardware just fine 'out of the box'. The challenge so far was getting SLES installed on the Acer. As it does not have a built-in CD/DVD drive, I needed to install from USB.

What's needed:

  • The SLES install DVD 1 - 32 or 64 bit
  • A USB flash drive with at least 2.6 GB free
  • A system, Linux or Windows, to create the media on

    • Note: If you have access to SUSE Studio, you can use that to quickly build a custom USB install. Sadly :) I don't have access yet, but managed to create a USB bootable stick quite easily following these two guides:

    http://en.opensuse.org/SuSE_install_from_USB_drive

    http://www.novell.com/support/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externa...

    The openSUSE page holds a modified mkbootdisk script that you'll need to build the boot part of the media with. The script supports FAT32 partitions.

    With the Novell TID, I was getting different errors when trying the steps with SLES 11. Using the steps mentioned in the openSUSE wiki gave me a good result.
    The Novell TID also indicates how to build the install media on a Windows machine.

    ~

    In a nutshell, this is what I had to do to create the USB media on an openSUSE 11.1 workstation:

  • zypper install syslinux #install package syslinux
  • mount -o loop [sles install media].iso /mnt #mount the SLES media to the /mnt directory
  • plug in the USB media #must be prepared with an empty FAT32 partition
  • cp -L -R /mnt/* /media/[mounted USB drive path] #copies all files from dvd to the usb device

    • Then after the copy has run:

  • umount /media/[mounted USB drive path] #or just dismount from the DE (GNOME/KDE)
  • run the mkusbboot as stated in the wiki # places the correct boot files etc
  • fdisk /dev/sdX # sdx being your USB device - check if and/or make the partition active/bootable

    • ~

    Installing from USB:

    When booting the SLES bootloader came up, but just before the installer would kick in i got the expected 'Make sure that CD number 1 is in your drive.'. After entering the correct install source using the text based menu the install when on normally.

    One thing to note is that the Acer was presenting the USB boot device as primary disk (sda) during the first portion of the install. My internal drive was set as sdb.

    In my case this was only for the first portion of the install. After the packages were installed and the system rebooted for the final configuration, my internal disk was seen as sda -and setup accordingly.
    After entering the correct install source, now sdb, a couple of more times the install completed successfully.

    In the situation that the boot drive is not setup correctly it could mean having to adjust the menu.1st and fstab to get the system booting correctly. So far this seems to not be a problem as SLES uses the disk-id rather then it's device name.

    Now the Acer is happily running as Groupwise, Webaccess, iFolder, FTP and Samba & print server.. without even breaking a sweat.

    Nifty little machine, this Acer!

    Submitted by willem on Mon, 10/12/2009 - 09:17
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