Installing Fedora 7 from USB Flash Disk on Aspire One

Friday, October 24, 2008

Actually, this current article has many header titles. As I succeeded uncover several hidden things behind my Aspire One during the installation of Fedora 7. But the great was, it’ll describe how to make Fedora 7 USB boot setup and also revealing what is under the 1st partition of the Aspire One hard drive - the recovery partition indeed. Why I choose Fedora 7 because I already loved it so much, a better performance, quite complete applications including 3rd party additional tools and of course a stable operating system kernel.

What you need to do this is a Fedora 7 boot disk image, an idle USB flash disk at least with 32MB capacity, Fedora 7 ISO DVD image and also a Linux computer system for preparing of USB boot. Anyway, disk partitioning tools such as Partition Magic might be required to restructuring the Aspire One hard drive partition under Windows.

Install disk partitioning tool if you don’t have any dedicated partition for Linux. At minimal, it need 2 system partitions; the root system & swap space. The size is up to you, but in my experiences, 7GB root partition & 500MB swap space was more than enough (see green box on picture below). Anyway, a red box on image referring the Acer recovery partition. This partition is unique. Somehow, we can’t see it from Windows Explorer even that it has been on FAT16 file system. You even can’t reach it from GHOST tool which I though it can. So, it makes me so suppressed & would like to see it physically from Linux.

Back to topic again, after you prepared the partition, put Fedora 7 ISO image on any kind partition with FAT32 file system, so that it readable from Fedora 7 setup. In my experiences, I put it on 2nd partition (drive D under VBOX directory ~ D:\VBOX). Next, it’s time to create the bootable USB disk. Download disk image from this link & extract it on your existing Linux system. Type the command below on current path in terminal where you extract the image.

$ dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sdax

The device /dev/sdax refer to your USB flash disk, so make an appropriate for your situation. If nothing goes wrong, now you’re ready to boot the flash drive. Change boot selections from F12 shortcut after you restart the computer. Press Enter to continue.

Then, a welcome screen will appear. Select first menu to begin the installation process. Continue the setup wizard until it asking the installation method screen.

On this chance, simply select Hard drive option then click OK to continue.

Next, the wizard will asking what partition and directory on selected partition hold the image for Fedora 7. On my example, select /dev/sda5 and type VBOX (without the ISO file name) which refer to directory holding image. Click OK again to continue.

The installation will begin. Follow the rest wizard just like the same as you install in normal condition until it completely finished. Now, you have Fedora 7 inside your Aspire One (dual boot with default Windows XP Home). By the way, did you remember when I told you about Acer recovery partition above? Check it out from file explorer (e.g.: Konqueror) after you manually mounting it, you can see the files physically & backup it to safe place.

To gain more additional 5GB space, you can delete it or merge this 1st partition from Windows Explorer to another existing partition using Partition Magic. Be careful, the change of partitions table might caused your Fedora 7 could not boot properly anymore.

Labels: Acer Aspire One, Fedora, Linux, USB Install