issues with usb key install from ubuntu

[ura_soul]

greetings!
i am installing the 32bit live iso image of mageia to a dell laptop and am using ubuntu 13.04 64bit to generate the usb key installer.
i read on the installation page here: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation_Media#Dump_Mageia_ISO_on_a_USB_flash_stick.3F
that copyiso2usbX and mandriva-seed are the recommended scripts..
i see that mandriva-seed 'does NOT work on a Mageia 3 system' - though this is unclearly written such that i am unsure if the problem is with using Mageia 3 as the source system for creating the usb key or if the problem is with installing a Mageia 3 image.
so i chose to use copyiso2usbX - however i attempted to install the dependencies and 'cdialog' is not found (i have all the core ubuntu repos activated).. searching the web has not yet yielded a cdialog file i can use.
Xdialog was also not found.

anyone know how best to resolve this?

thanks

[djennings]

The 'dd' method described on the same page should work OK.

[ura_soul]

thanks for responding.

i ran the command: sudo dd if=Mageia-3-LiveCD-GNOME-en-i586-CD.iso of=/dev/sde1 bs=1M

which returned:
697+0 records in
697+0 records out
730857472 bytes (731 MB) copied, 24.9293 s, 29.3 MB/s

i was initially unable to read the usb key in ubuntu.. until i removed the key and put it back into the usb port. then i could see 3 folders on the drive - boot / isolinux / loopbacks.
i started to boot the laptop from this key and no install process was initiated.. so there is an issue of some kind.

i put the key back into ubuntu and found that i cannot delete the folders that are on the key, even using root access..
anyone know why this may be?

thanks

[djennings]

i ran the command: sudo dd if=Mageia-3-LiveCD-GNOME-en-i586-CD.iso of=/dev/sde1 bs=1M

There is your problem.

From the instructions

Since this method uses the whole usb stick you have to specify the node of the device and not of a partition on the device (e.g. use /dev/sde not /dev/sde1);

Do it again this time using sde instead of sde1

Because the dd overwrites the partition table of the usb stick you will need to reformat it to make it usable again.

[ura_soul]

ah ok, thanks.

i got the stick to be recognied by the latpop.. though now i have another issue where the os simply doesn't finish loading. i choose to boot from the live usb and after about 20+ seconds the screen is either blank or on run through, there was some text on screen with not especiall helpful messages (the different results were probably due to me choosing different options via the Function keys, such as ACPI and 'driver'. i don't yet know what those options exactly do, although no choices have so far yielded a successful boot.
i have already successfully booted several GNU/linux distributions on this laptop.. so.. there is no terminal hardware fault causing the issue.