The saga of me trying to install CentOS on my "Acer Aspire One" netbook continues...

Because there is no CD drive on this netbook I had to boot using a strange combination of 2 USB sticks.


The situation...

Stick X = bare-bones CentOS bootstrapper boots to a menu where I can specify "linux askmethod".

Stick Y = Large (but for some reason unbootable) stick that contains the CDROM ISO files for the whole 6 disk set of CentOS 5.1. MD5sums are valid.

So, I insert BOTH USB sticks and then start the computer. I select to boot from stick X, it loads up the bootstrapper and I begin the centos install specifying to use stick Y as the hard-disk containing the ISO files. So far so good.

Anaconda starts up (kernel has mounted the first ISO correctly) and lets me do the normal stuff of specifying partitions to format and all that. Then its package selection.

However when it gets to the bit about the bootloader options it gices me two options
  • The GRUB boot loader will be installed on /dev/sdc (this is Stick Y, containing the ISOs!)
  • No bootloader will be installed.


What the hell? Surely GRUB should be installed on the drive that I'm installing the OS on and not the drive with my ISOs?

I only realised that this had happened after the first time I did the full install. The netbook wouldn't boot if I removed stick Y from the USB port. Turns out I didn't notice the "/dev/sdc" part when I did the install.

I'm reluctant to reinstall the OS again because it takes about 3 hours. Does anyone know how I can solve this?

I've had a good look at the /boot/grub folder on the netbook and it does seem to be looking for the USB stick as part of the mandatory boot sequence. I can't seem to edit these files in order to prevent this.

Strangely, the USB stick doesn't seem to have any GRUB-related data on it at all.

Perplexed.