Mageia forum

I THINK what I need to do is download the full iso to a local drive, then download the network iso and burn it to a USB stick. Boot from the USB, point the installer to the distribution iso on let the magic happen. Is that it??

I've done it before and been using Mageia for years. I'm just in panic recovery mode and trying to make sure I don't lose my data after a recent lightening storm took out a hard drive!

Thanks...

Booting/installing from USB is not a network install.

If you only want to run the installer or one of the live media from USB, this is linked directly from our download page:
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation ... lash_drive

You may want to start with describing what you actually want to achieve. Do you want to rescue your system? Then panic is not a good idea.
Better describe what you actually see or take a picture with your smartphone or camera when you try to boot and end up in recovery mode.
Usually this is due to a filesystem check not completing successfully, and the only thing that needs to be done is login as root,
and run fsck on the device with that filesystem. E.g. /dev/sda5 is your / filesystem, then you would run

Code: Select all

fsck -y /dev/sda5

I understand that booting from a USB isn't an installation over a network. But when booting from a USB stick that has the network iso installed on it, aren't you offered the choice to install from a network, or an iso on a local hard drive, etc.???
I have a usb hard drive that won't spin up at all. I have another drive that if it's connected when attempting to boot (from any source), the system displays the word GRUB and never does anything else. I was able to download a copy of the Live iso (somehow, I ended up with Version 8), burn it to USB and boot after disconnecting the 2 problem drives. My /home directory is safe and intact.
I thought the network iso worked like this screen shot... Is that not true??

mbramble wrote:But when booting from a USB stick that has the network iso installed on it, aren't you offered the choice to install from a network, or an iso on a local hard drive, etc.???

Well when you can boot from an USB stick you can simply write the ISO directly to the USB stick, unless it's only a 512MB stick.
It's probably easier to borrow a bigger USB stick from somebody.

mbramble wrote:I thought the network iso worked like this screen shot... Is that not true??

Yes, that's how the network installer works.

There's also a guide for this: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installing_M ... SO_on_disk

Thanks. Got everything back up minus the one drive that will no longer spin up. No real data lost...
I did do a network install using the Magia 9 iso that was already on one of my drive partitions. Was having a heck of a time making a Bootable USB stick on my old Windows laptop. That's why I was trying to make the smallest bootable usb stick that I could to get going again.

mbramble wrote:Was having a heck of a time making a Bootable USB stick on my old Windows laptop.

For next time, you may want to take a look at https://rufus.ie/en/

Yep, that's what I finally used.