Re: Failure to dd diskboot.img to pen drive

Phil Meyer said the following on 11/15/2007 01:43 PM Pacific Time:
Good advice, and the OP has only a 1GB pen drive, but for those with a 4GB or larger pen drive, you have better options.

First slam the broken MBR shipped on most pen drives:

unmount any mounted partitions from the device

# cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin >/dev/sdb

($ rpm -qf /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin
syslinux-3.36-7.fc8)

Second, use fdisk to create two partitions on the tumb drive. The first one can be 12 or 13 MB depending on manufacturer. Make it 13MB to be safe.

Now you can dd the bootdisk.img to the first partition and it will be bootable.

Thirdly, format the second partition as FAT32

# mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb2 -n images

copy the Fedora DVD image to the second partition.

Now you have a pen drive that can do the entire install, not just the boot.


Thanks for the clear and simple write-up. I had experimented with dd-ing a DVD image to a 4G USB stick and it didn't work.

If the DVD ISO can be burned and booted from DVD media, why can't the DVD.iso be written to a USB stick booted the same way boot.iso is?

IOW: dd if=/Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso of=/dev/sdc
where /dev/sdc is the USB stick didn't work (boot)--why is that?

John

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