boot - Creating a bootable USB drive from a distro split over two DVD ISOs

I am searching and not finding the right way to do this. Please note, I don't think I'm trying for anything strange here. I just want to make a bootable USB stick of a single OS that happens to be larger than one DVD and happens to be larger than FAT32 will allow for in a single file.

On our slow connection I spent a long time downloading CentOS 5.9's two DVD ISOs:

CentOS-5.9-x86_64-bin-DVD-1of2.iso  (4.4 GB)
CentOS-5.9-x86_64-bin-DVD-2of2.iso  (718 MB)

I have a USB stick that I want to somehow get these two ISOs on. Since the first one is 4.4 GB, I can't use ISO2USB because it insists on FAT32. I cannot find an alternative that lets you specify more than one ISO image--of the same distro, I'm not trying for some fancy multi-boot thing--to put on the same stick.

I guess I should have downloaded the CD ISOs, but I thought I was "saving time" because then I wouldn't have as many files to run through the md5 checker. There's no IMG file of the whole thing (only a net install version, which I don't want--I want to pre-download everything) otherwise I would've gone for that. So, given that I have these two DVD ISOs, how can I get them on a stick that will boot and make use of both of them properly to install CentOS somewhere?

Again, I don't think this is anything out of the ordinary, yet I can't find software/docs that seem to support this. Am I stuck re-downloading everything in CD-sized ISOs just to do this?

I found this, but it doesn't run on Windows. I am using Windows to prepare the stick.

Answer

Unfortunately, you can't, for the reasons discussed in the comments. Your options are:

1. Burn them onto two DVDs.


2. Download the CD ISOs and use ISO2USB. (This is what I ended up doing, and it worked, unlike my other answer.)


3. Download the net ISO and have the rest of the components you need be downloaded at the time of installation.