[GLLUG] Bootable USB Stick

[Richard Houser]

That used to be the case, but in the last few years, many distros are
shipping ISO images that cannot be directly written to a flash stick.  I
don't have any idea why that basic compatibility was dropped, but you must
now modify the images with something like isodumper to get that capability
back.  I've provided some sample instructions for Mageia, but the process
should be similar for other such distributions:
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/IsoDumper_Writing_ISO_images_on_USB_sticks

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Charles Ulrich <charles at bityard.net> wrote:

> Which distribution? Any halfway decent distro these days ships ISO images
> suitable for both burning to a disc and writing to a USB drive. Just dd the
> image right to the device. If your USB stick shows up as /dev/sdb, then:
>
>   dd if=file.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M
>
> And reboot! Note that not all machines of a certain vintage will
> successfully boot from USB, even if they claim to be able to.
>
> Thanks,
> Charles
>
> On 11/05/2015 09:47 PM, Chick Tower wrote:
>
>> I wanted to upgrade a disto on my IBM ThinkPad T41, but it appears that
>> the CD/DVD drive no longer works.  I tried setting up grub2 to boot the
>> .iso file for the live/installation CD, but that hasn't worked yet. Then
>> I thought I'd make a bootable USB stick, using an 8GB one that I don't
>> use much and is still pretty new.  However, that's not going well,
>> either.  Even when I select during boot to boot the USB drive, nothing
>> happens for a while and then the normal grub2 menu pops up.  Has anyone
>> had much success creating a bootable USB stick?
>>
>> I tried using dd to copy the .iso file to the stick, but that doesn't
>> work.  I tried unetbootin on Manjaro Linux, but that doesn't work.  I
>> consulted the Arch wiki and found this page
>>
>> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/USB_flash_installation_media
>>
>> It says unetbootin doesn't work, but it's directions on editing the
>> incorrect file don't help me because mine doesn't look anything like the
>> example on that page.
>>
>> I haven't tried the method of copying the files from the mounted .iso to
>> the mounted USB stick, but it might be the one that works.  Now I think
>> I'll just mount the hard drive in my ThinkPad T42 and install it there
>> before returning the hard drive to the T41.
>>
>> Does anyone have any advice for creating a bootable USB?  Is it possible
>> to create one using a distro that is not related in any way to the one
>> in the .iso file?  I don't want to use Win7 to do this, so please don't
>> suggest that unless it's the only way.
>>
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