Boot usb problem

[Tz]

Hi, can anyonte tell me a usb boot program you used and worked? tried several and none made a decent usb boot, i wanted to test mageia but seems to be the only distro i cannot create a boot usb. tried rufus, lili, etc
Is there a simple usb boot program for windows that works?
Thanks

[RVDowning]

I had a similar problem. I was only to boot after using the dd command to copy all.img to the USB which was then used to install Mageia 3 over the internet.

[filip]

There are some propositions and more information in Wiki for that purpose.

[dennisk]

Try this command:

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$ su -c "cp Mageia-3-LiveCD-KDE4-en-i586-CD.iso /dev/sdb && sync"

Use dmesg to be certain you select the correct thumbdrive - here /dev/sdb. All data on this device will be overwritten so disconnect any other external drives to be safe.

[filip]

Try this command:

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$ su -c "cp Mageia-3-LiveCD-KDE4-en-i586-CD.iso /dev/sdb && sync"

Are you sure that this works? What about boot sector of USB thumbdrive?

[Ken-Bergen]

Are you sure that this works? What about boot sector of USB thumbdrive?

Have you tried it?
I did and it booted just like one written with the dd command.
I'm not sure if there's advantage of one over the other.

[filip]

Did you really fully erase thumbdrive before test? Including boot sector?

I might be wrong but AFAIK cp doesn't write to boot sector.

[doktor5000]

You're writing directly to the raw device ... no partitioning, no boot sector, the whole device will get overwritten. Should work.

[dennisk]

Yes, it works. It's the way Debian does it. Notice that you are writing to the device /dev/sdb NOT a partition /dev/sdb1.

[filip]

Great. Thanks for enlightenment dennisk and doktor5000.