Making o f USB boot media for BIOS-based systems

When you perform this procedure any data on the USB flash drive is destroyed with no warning.
Make sure that you specify the correct USB flash drive, and make sure that this flash drive does
not contain any data that you want to keep.

1. Plug in your USB flash drive.

2. Become root:
su -

3. Your flash drive must have a single partition with a vfat file system. T o determine how it is
formatted, find the name of this partition and the device itself by running dmesg shortly after
connecting the drive. T he device name (similar to /dev/sdc) and the partition name (similar to

/dev/sdc1) both appear in several lines towards the end of the output.

4. Use the partition name to ensure that the file system type of the USB flash drive is vfat.

# blkid partition

You should now see a message similar to:

LABEL="LIVE" UUID="6676-27D3" TYPE="vfat"

If T YPE is anything other than vfat (for example, T YPE="iso9660"), clear the first blocks of the
USB flash drive:
# dd   if=/dev/zero  of=partition bs= 1M count= 100

5. Use the dd command to transfer the boot ISO image to the USB device:
# dd  if= path/image_name.iso  of=device
where path/image_name.iso is the boot ISO image file that you downloaded from the Red Hat
Customer Portal and device is the device name for the USB flash drive. Ensure you specify the

device name, not the partition name. For example:
# dd   if= /home/user/Downloads/RHEL6-Server-i 386-boot.iso of= /dev/sdc