You can't. There used to be a --download-only option in yum, but it was removed.
But even if the flag you wanted existed, you can't run yum on another machine - you need the database that yum creates as it installs various programs - otherwise it doesn't know what to download.
I'm assuming this is a situation where the RHEL box is not connected to the network...
So: Go out to RedHat and - using cygwin's ftp client or another of your choice - download everything with a release date after your install. Put those on the external drive.
Move the drive to your RHEL system and mount it. Copy all the files to /var/cache/yum/ and then use the -C flag (cache only) on your yum update. The flag tells yum to use cache and download only if it has to. If you are missing something, go back to the desktop, copy it down, add to the cache ...
-----Burton
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by: unSpawnPosted on 2008-09-06 at 10:15:47ID: 22408200
If I'm not mistaken Yum only downloads updates for packages you have installed. So I would think that installing Yum on its own could not accomplish much without RPM database to query. If that's the case then you would also need to install RPM, populate a RPMDB, install RPM utilities, Python and Python-RPM bindings (and also work out syncing your RPMDB with a copy on say /cygdrive/g for the benefit of Cygwin's Yum). If you want to download all packages efficiently maybe have a look at say Rsync (and run create-repo on the download directory afterwards)?