openSUSE USB Install

Installing openSUSE 11.4 using a USB drive.

Download the openSUSE-11.4-DVD-x86_64.iso file for 64bit x86 system. I used another Linux system to prepare the USB drive, you can also boot from a Linux live DVD. Need at least an 8GB USB drive, openSUSE 11.4 iso is 4.3GB.

1. Erase USB drive using dd:
Use dmesg to identify the USB drive device (example: sdb).
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=65536 count=10000

2. Use zypper to update the syslinux:
# zypper in syslinux

3. Run isohybrid, isohybrid is availabe with the updated syslinux:
# isohybrid /path…/openSUSE-11.4-DVD-x86_64.iso
where path… is the directory location of the openSUSE iso.

4. Write the content of the iso file to the USB drive:
# dd if=/path…/openSUSE-11.4-DVD-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

Boot from the USB flash drive to install openSUSE 11.4

Note: You’ll get a warning when you run isohyrid:

Warning: more than 1024 cylinders (4403).
Not all BIOSes will be able to boot this device.

The cylinder=1024. It should be ok to procede if you have a newer system (south bridge that support SATA). The section of isohybrid perl scripts that displayed the error looks like this:
$c = int($imgsize/$cylsize);
if ($c > 1024) {
    print STDERR “Warning: more than 1024 cylinders ($c).\n”;
    print STDERR “Not all BIOSes will be able to boot this device.\n”;
    $cc = 1024;
} else {
    $cc = $c;
}