[Cialug] Making a bootable USB

[Zachary Kotlarek]

On Jun 7, 2010, at 4:57 PM, L. V. Lammert wrote:

> Been trying to make a bootable thumb drive, .. the OpenSuSe site says that
> dd should work, but I have tried three different bootable .iso's, and none
> of the thumb drives boot.
> 
> Does anyone know the secret?



A) You need a very recent disk image. Generating a hybrid MBR/El Torito block image is only first possible in syslinux 3.72 and later, and not really perfected until several version later, so it's fairly recent feature by distro bootloader standards. You may simply not have a new enough image. But if you do it *should* work when you just dd from the ISO to the disk.

B) It is possible to reconfigure a non-hybrid ISO to boot from USB/HDD/floppy media, but it's probably more work than you're hoping. You'd have to do a standard partition, filesystem format, file-level copy, and then bootloader setup. That's why people write scripts and tools to do it. You should probably use one unless you want to learn about how booting works.

C) You could just install to the USB device the same way you would a hard drive. Unless you specifically want the no-persistent-storage behavior you get from a LiveCD there's probably no benefit (and possible detriments) to booting that configuration over a normal installation.

	Zach

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