Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Writing a .iso to a USB drive in Linux

I've recently been attempting to test the lastest LTS release of Ubuntu: 12.04 Precise Pangolin on a touchscreen laptop recently retired from active service in my agency. I grabbed my .iso and tried first with UNetbootin, only to be dumped rather unceremoniously to a (initramfs) prompt with BusyBox.

After failing in my first attempt I decided to try some advice I found here: simply umount /dev/sdc1 (or whatever) then cat diskimage.iso > /dev/sdc1. While this did appear to create a good disk, I was unable to boot it at all.

Then after reading the bootable USB creation instructions on the Ubuntu page I decided to try the Mac methodology since I've used dd for this purpose before and I see no reason why this wouldn't work on Linux. Strangely though, it did not.

The eventual solution I found was to rename the .iso to .img and use usb-imagewriter from the ubuntu repositories. *shrugs*

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