unetbootin

[Michael Butash]

Check and see if unetbootin these days writes the correct disk label on 
usb.

I ran into an issue years ago fiddling with Arch where their iso would 
only boot with a particular disk label, using that (in theory) to find 
what /dev/sdX it was found by udev as.  A flawed ass-u-me'ption, as 
unetbootin didn't bother to write the correct label the iso was looking 
for, and took me reverse engineering their boot process to even figure 
that much out.  Far quicker to burn an infernal cd-rom...

I've personally never had good luck making/booting linux iso's from usb 
oddly, especially debian-installer-based systems just never work right 
even once booted.  I keep an old usb cdrom around as sadly we can't seem 
to move beyond them.

-mb


On 10/19/2016 12:12 PM, Matt Graham wrote:
> On 2016-10-18 11:31, Michael wrote:
>> I just put mint on a pendrive with unetbootin and I don't know if it
>> is working or not. I put the live linux distro in the thinkpad 11e,
>> start it up, and press F12.and select 'USB HDD...' but when I press
>> enter Windows10 loads. I then turned off the Linux box to test the
>> pendrive but come to find out that this computer will not boot off of
>> the USB drive.  Is there a way to test the drive?
>
> The entire USB drive should probably be mountable as type iso9660 or 
> udf.  The vast majority of things that can boot from USB drives will 
> recognize ISO images that have been dd'ed directly to the disk, and 
> that's how you usually boot from a USB drive. unetbootin is almost 
> certainly just doing "dd if=/path/to/linux-mint-12.34.iso of=/dev/sdX 
> bs=1M" behind the scenes.
>
> (I did see something odd a few days ago when trying to diagnose a 
> completely different problem.  I dd'ed a Gentoo net install image to a 
> USB disk, then booted the machine from that disk.  The installer 
> loaded its initrd, then said that it couldn't find the root 
> filesystem.  I tried several device names and got nowhere, though 1 of 
> them should've worked.  It might have been confused by the 
> larger-than-usual number of disks attached to this machine, or 
> might've forgotten to do "modprobe ehci-hcd".  Will attempt to figure 
> this out later.)
>