Preparations for 'Boot XYZ FIle'

Danger

Only run the following commands if you know what they are doing!

If you already have GRUB installed and working, you probably just need to edit your grub.cfg file (for most OSes in the /boot directory).

The disk to be used should be:

  • Boot Target in BIOS / UEFI
  • First in the BIOS / UEFI boot order

The disk used in this example is /dev/sda.

  1. Prepare Disk partition layout
    • Create two partitions on the disk (use, e.g., fdisk, parted, etc)
      • 1MB (flags: boot)
      • 10G or more as you want / need (flags: boot), ext4 formatted
    • Run blkid /dev/sda2 -s UUID -o value to get the UUID of the "first" disk's second partition.
      • Save the UUID of the "first" disk down. The UUID of the "first" disk will be used in form of the __BOOT_PART_UUID__ later on.
  2. Mount "boot" Partition
    • Mount the second created partition (/dev/sda2): mount /dev/sda2 /boot.
  3. Download Fedora vmlinuz, initramfs and install.img to /boot directory.
    • Prefix the downloaded files with fedora- (or whatever you want as long as you change it in the upcoming steps as well)

  4. Grub Installation

    • For GRUB2:

      1
      grub2-install --no-floppy /dev/sda2

    • For GRUB:

    1
    grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda2

  5. Create GRUB boot config file

    • For GRUB2 the path is /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.
    • For GRUB the path is /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

Optional steps:

  1. Copy your Kickstart and / or config file to the /boot directory
    • This assumes the "system" you are using is able to open the /boot mounted partition and read the file from there, e.g., Kickstart can do it like that inst.ks="hd:UUID=__BOOT_PART_UUID__:/ks.cfg" (where the __BOOT_PART_UUID__ is the partition UUID).
  2. Reboot and enjoy!