- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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I generally use the Raspberry Pi Imager, It works just as well with USB’s as TF cards.
Me too! I have used it for a couple other non-rpi devices in the past as well. It is super simple and works on my Mac. I haven’t even looked at other utilities in years.
Also a Raspi Imager fan when I have Pis around since I usually have it installed anyway.
I would use dd, but I always worry I’ll bungle something and only use it when necessary. I’m trying to write a utility called Rubber Duck Disk Dump that takes all the same options but parses your command beforehand to try to guess what you’re doing and warn you if it is really, really stupid, and if you type yes, it then passes all args straight to dd.
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It’s also an old and jumbled-up format paralleling .gif in a surprising amount of ways, including being never intended for its primary usage, still being popular, and newer formats proving much better.
Wait why was iso not intended to be used like this? As far as I can see, it was always meant as a digital image of a CD, which is how it was used, and pretty much still is right?
Oops, yeah, you’re right. I was thinking about the live ISO functionality.
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I have Ventoy on a USB stick, tried to use it recently for DBAN and it didn’t work, is there any way to get around that these days? Haven’t looked into it recently.
It works for Ultimate Boot CD, which includes DBAN and a lot of other fun stuff.
I play with retro hardware and Ventoy has also worked for me with some weird old isos that even Rufus didn’t work with (XP/Server 2003 multidisc from eXPerience that uses a Linux bootloader?)
That good advice, thank you, will definitely give that a shot!
Only 4? Those are rookie numbers
Need a bigger dongle.
Found the Ventoy bro /s
@AlligatorBlizzard @JustMarkov
Only FOUR ISO’s?
I forget the number, but I maxed out a 32GB flash drive with an absurd amount of ISO’s *LOL*
Wowzerz, this new external NVMe I need to format, how many ISO’s can I shoehorn onto 1TB, and the boot speeds will probably blow my mind \0/
What are some recommendations for putting Ventoy on your main USB (with other contents instead of just ISOs)? I need to find the guide I saw, it mentioned some configurations to prevent it from searching every directory for ISOs
Also the linked website can be subscribed to from here :)
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Alternatively when creating the ventoy installation you can chose to leave X amount of space behind the ventoy partition and then create your own data partition there afterwards. You lose the advantage of “dynamically” sharing the available space between ventoy and your data, but with the seperqte partition you can use whatever filesystem you like for your data, and there is a clear seperation between ventoy and your other data.
I never really noticed performance decrease. But still this is great to know - thank you!
Great suggestions. The Ventoy bros are weird. Just use what works for you.
I do use Ventoy, but a more “traditional” alternative that I like is Popsicle. Super lightweight, and works very well. Some cases do require a dedicated USB, where Ventoy won’t work, at least not without trickery (e.g. anything with persistent storage).
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Does it work for any distro other than fedora tho?
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It even works on Windows
(☝︎ ՞ਊ ՞)☝︎
dd
Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network (
dd status=progress ... | nc ...).deleted by creator
I really don’t get why I should use anything else than dd
“What, you guys don’t spend money in several external ssds?”
– this guy
What? You can use dd to read/write any block storage device (or file)
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Not everyone likes to install compicated graphical software which does a thousand and one things it shouldn’t do just to copy files to an external drive
My favorite way to create a boot media is simply to use cat. No arguments, no shenanigans just a cat into the device :
cat debian.iso > /dev/sdaiirc there was a reason you should use dd instead of directly copying the data, I think something to do with device block alignment or something?
That could be possible but for the moment I didn’t encouter any problem with cat. I think I’m going to stick with it for the time being.
Replace cat with pv to get a progress bar for free
One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with
sudoas-is, unlikedd.Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…
Right, I just meant that you can’t
sudo cat file > /dev/sdabut you cansudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)Oh right, my bad x) I agree, it’s a little bit akward to use su then cat everytime.
Fear?
Another program that works on Windows, which I prefer to Balena Etcher, but less so than Rufus: unetbootin
I’ve used ventoy to set up a bootable USB with Mint & MX options. It allowed me to set the Mint with persistence. The MX has issues with persistence.
How to set up reusable boot with dd I don’t know.
MX has its own built in tool to make a bootable USB with persistence
Will have to check it out.
Thanks
I like Ventoy because I’m an ISO hoarder but if the task needs a dedicated USB, then I’ll open Etcher.
I don’t… understand… the downvotes. I do the same thing though I never really get to the Balena Etcher part. Also, Ventoy is the only way to get a Windows ISO up and running from Linux, as far as I know.
Sadly the “reddit mentality” has already established in this community – theres no “why” in these downvotes other than as a self-relief/validation thing.
The down votes are from the Etcher part, it has a cult of lovers and a cult of haters.
I’m l fine with people using Etcher, Rufus, or whatever works for them, but I’m aware that both software I just named has passionate haters.
Etcher is not recommend anymore because it’s adware and there are better free alternative like Impression
I’ll check Impression out, thanks!
dd, or cat with a shell redirect are all you need to write that iso.
My trouble with dd is all the flags I need to remember to make it fast and more convenient.
dd if=file of=/dev/device oflag=direct status=progress bs=1Mis there anything I’m missing?bs=1M
This part varies based on your hardware (my hardware is much faster with a value of 4096) , but other than that it’s everything.
Here is a handy script that can help determine which bs size is best for your hardware.
I think you might mean 4096.
Yes, I do! Thanks!
Neat! I’ll have to try that out.
The video description says it’s aimed at Windows users, dd and cat have no power there
oflag=direct
What does this do?
oflag=direct
Prevents the writes from piling up in the cache. dd will report the transfer is done when the writes have been cached so this setting prevents dd from exiting until the data has been written completely to the block device.
Use
conv=fsyncThis ensures the cache is written before dd exits, but doesn’t necessarily write to disk directly. This means that, for small files, dd can finish release its hold on the input file quicker
dd can be soooo much faster too. But like you, I always forget the tags. I should make an alias sometime…
Little known fact, Disk Manager comes with almost every distro, and works just fine.
I don’t burn ISOs often enough to need a dedicated ventoy drive, or to remember how to use the DD command, so Impression is generally what I use. I generally prefer Libadwaita/GTK4 apps that look at home on my system.
Does impression support Windows ISOs? Or only ISOHybrid (what Linux ISOs use so you can add them)
I have no idea, I’ve not had to install windows in a while. From a quick search I see conflicting info…
A user reported it didn’t work, then the dev said he tested it and it works fine
