Core 4 Bootable DVD

[ZiaTioN]

I downloaded core 4 a while back in the DVD iso format and am wanting to install it now but can not seem to figure out how to make the dang iso bootable. Nero (on windows) says it can do it but I have no luck whatsoever. What is the point in offering a dvd image if you can not make it bootable?

I have searched google and have found what appear to be valid responses to the same question but due to my wonderfully stable and reliable ISP I can not seem to get to any of these sites right now. This site and a few others are all I am able to access

I currently have the system up on core 2. Could I just sftp the file over and do a hardrive install? If so could I just add an entry into grub and have it boot to this non bootable image from the harddisk? If so what will happen when I reformat the entire disk (which I plan on doing)? Wont this wipe the image?

In the end I would like to be able to make this image bootable and burn to a DVD so I can have it in the future and make copies for friends etc....

[Void Main]

The ISO image *is* bootable. If it doesn't boot after you write it then I can think of only 3 reasons why that might be:

1) Image is corrupt (did you md5sum/sha1sum it and did it pass?)
2) Your DVD burning software did not properly write the image
3) Your DVD drive isn't bootable

There is nothing special that has to be done to make it bootable, in my experience it's just like burning CD images (cdrecord/dvdrecord/k3b/etc).

[ZiaTioN]

Yeah I did some looking into the iso image using isobuster and did see a boot image file with the proper boot data. I am willing to bet that your numbet two is the problem. Nero keeps giving me an error when I try to create a boot iso due to the size of the iso being larger than 2 GB. This used to be a filesystem limitation of iso but does not appear to be the case anymore? Maybe I am using an outdated version of nero (version 6). I am going to try to boot the file from the burner on my other system to see if it boots there to rule out your number three.

[Master of Reality]

2GB is a filesize limitation of some operating systems... i think that was solved with Linux 2.4, but it sounds like your using a Microsoft product if your using nero. And of course those products are usually far behind, so it may be that it still has a limit of a file size of 2GB.
This would give you an invalid image file, So check the checksum and make sure it is valid!

[Void Main]

I am curious why if you have FC2 up you would be doing "any" of this in Windows? You should have all the tools you need already there. Verify with md5sum, mount the image on a loop device to look inside, write with cdrecord. That's how I always do it and everything seems to work just fine. Don't remember if there were DVD enabled cdrecord in FC2 though, might have to upgrade some things there. Oh and yes, you should be able to install without writing the ISO image. I think you put the image in the root directory of the first partition and boot from CD. There should be a boot/install CD image in the DVD ISO (just mount it on a loop device). You could create the CD, boot from it and then install from either hard drive or from your DVD if it's readable. The instructions should be in the release notes on the DVD or on the web site:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-in ... de-en/fc4/
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-in ... -from-disc
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-in ... drive.html

The 2.6 kernel is now too large to fit on a floppy so you have to boot from CD or DVD.

[ZiaTioN]

> I am curious why if you have FC2 up you would be doing "any" of this in Windows?

I am doing this on windows because that is currently where my external, usb 2.0 sony dual layer dvd recorder is hooked up to. I do not want to mess around with getting it to work on Core 2 just to turn around 5 minutes later and wipe the entire disk.

The problem was:
1) I was trying to build a bootable iso image in nero by adding a bootable iso image as a file in a compilation.

2) My DVD reader does not seem to be able to boot dvd's.

In nero 6 (and others) you can choose to create a bootable image and nero will do all the work for you. You just have to add FILES to the compilation and nero will create the boot image and iso it up and burn it all for you. I was trying to use this method to burn the already bootable image and adding this image to the compilation as only a single file in the compilation so when nero burned it it added the FC4 image as part of another image (image inside of image type deal). So when the bios went looking for a boot image one level deep it could not find it because it was sitting two levels deep.

The 2 GB error came from the fact that when creating a bootable compilation in nero, nero tries to be platform independant and therefore requires that all files in the compilation be smaller than 2 GB each so to not CeNsOrEd off older filesystems such as FAt and FAT32 along with older Linux kernels.. Since I was adding the FC4 image, which was 2.9 GB, as a single file of the compilation I was getting this error. Now it did suck that this "feature" was not selectable but that would not have solved my problem anyway.

In the end I realized I just had to use neros "burn image file" option instead of creating an image file and all was well. I still had to end up downloading all the CD isos though as well because of my second problem above. I do not believe that my dvd reader is capable of booting images. I say this because I burned the DVD image the right way (eventually) and it still did not work. However I downloaded and burned all 5 iso images in less than 1 hour (got to love cable) and they booted just fine.