Creating Boot USB Using Disks
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I have had a lot of teething problems over the years installing GNU/Linux from USB, which I've had to do because I was using a PC with no working optical drive. I've used UNetbootin quite a bit, and sometimes this worked fine, but other times created various problems, such as:
* the installing trying to load files from an optical drive rather than the USB
* GRUB being written to the boot USB rather than the target hard drive being installed to
* not even getting the installer to launch
* other random fails during installation (infrequent)
Folks in these forums have suggested writing .ISO image directly to the USB using DD, which they assure me works for Trisquel images, but I have no idea how it goes for other distros.
Recently, I've had some success created boot USBs using the "restore image" option in the Disks utility in the Control Panel. I simply select my USB drive in the list, select "restore image", and point it at the .ISO I want to use for the install. Usually there is a warning that the target drive is smaller than the image, so I just click 'Start Restoring...', and it seems to work.
Does anyone know if this is functionally the same as using DD from the command line, or is it an ugly hack like using UNetBootin, and similarly liable to create unexpected problems down the line?
My experience tells me that the graphical startup disk creator can cause
the same problems as using the other tools you know (only exception
being, of course, GNU `dd`).
As far as I understand (and please, don't take my words as true, because
I'm still learning what `dd` does): `dd` works because it copies the
**contents** of the input file to output file.
However, if I recall correctly `dd` doesn't make registries in the file
system where the output file is (for example, if you were to use `dd` to
copy a directory to some other place in same file system, you might end
up with a broken output file). This is why we must unmount the USB disk
device (and preferably, format it) before copying a live image to it
(because the file system in this case would be that of the USB disk
device).
I am a translator!
I can assure you I used dd for at least 5 different distros and it never failed, not once.
"teething troubles" is a very interesting idiom.
Fig. difficulties and problems experienced in the early stages of a project, activity, etc.
There have been a lot of teething troubles with the new computer system.
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