Prepare Installation Media

Introduction

The installation media is now a hybrid ISO image, working in two ways:

• An ISO image file ready to burn on CD
• A raw sector (IMG) image file ready to directly dd to flash media (USB Stick)

Using USB sticks is faster and more environmental friendly and therefore the recommended way to install Proxmox VE.

Write the ISO image to USB

In order to boot the installation media you need to copy the ISO image to your USB media. You need at least a 512 mb USB stick.

Note: Using UNetbootin or Rufus does not work.

Instructions for Windows

• Make sure that your USB media is not mounted and does not contain any data.
• In order to copy the ISO, you need to rename it first, just rename the downloaded file from proxmox-ve_2.0-*.iso to proxmox-ve_2.0-*.raw.
• Download the SUSE Studio ImageWriter and run as admin. If this doesn't work (e.g. Win7), you can use the OSForsenics USB installer instead
• Copy the image to your USB media

Instructions for Linux (and OSX)

You can simply use dd on unix like systems. First download the ISO image, then plug in the USB stick (you need to find out what device name gets assigned to the USB stick. You can compare the last lines of 'dmesg' command before and after the insertion, or use the 'lsblk' command and identify using the size if unique).

dd if=pve-cd.iso of=/dev/XYZ bs=1M

Be sure to replace /dev/XYZ with the correct device name (be careful, and do not overwrite your hard disk!)

Boot your server from USB media

Connect your USB media to your server and make sure that the server boots from USB - and follow the installation wizard.

External resources

• SUSE Live USB stick