ISOs Explained + four programs to make Linux boot media

mesamune@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 163 points – ISOs Explained + four programs to make Linux boot media
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four programs to make Linux boot media

Or you can use one Ventoy to make a boot media with four Linux ISOs.

Found the Ventoy bro /s

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 :)

!veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube

https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_search_path.html

tl;dr: create a .ventoyignore file inside the folder you want Ventoy not to scan.

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!

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!

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.

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

Sadly the "reddit mentality" has already established in this community -- theres no "why" in these downvotes other than as a self-relief/validation thing.

I really don’t get why I should use anything else than dd

Not everyone likes to use commands for something as trivial as this, its nice to press a couple buttons and wait for it to be done vs learning how dd works and what arguments to use etc.

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/sda

iirc 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.

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 sudo as-is, unlike dd.

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/sda but you can sudo 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.

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

"What, you guys don't spend money in several external ssds?"

-- this guy

Great suggestions. The Ventoy bros are weird. Just use what works for you.

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=1M is 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.

Neat! I'll have to try that out.

dd can be soooo much faster too. But like you, I always forget the tags. I should make an alias sometime...

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=fsync

This 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

The video description says it's aimed at Windows users, dd and cat have no power there

dd

Lpt: root your Android phone so that you can dd the thing in case the screen breaks.

Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

Nice thing about GNOME DE is it comes with Gnome Disks. Select device, click the restore image button and point to the ISO

Or you could just install it on any other system with Wayland or x11.

Gparted works fine for me, so that's what I use.

Gparted is awesome. But probably overwhelming for newbies just looking to burn an iso to USB. Raspberry PI Image Writer works very simply also.

I like how simple Mint's USB image writer makes it for newbies, both to look it up in the menu as well as the simple UI

Yes, mint is good like that. GNOME has a separate Image Writer app/icon, but it has been turned off by default. So it is less discoverable for new people, but more simplified as is the GNOME way

Fedora Media Writer is the best, I hardly use BalenaEtcher but its good too incase the former doesnt work

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

I generally use the Raspberry Pi Imager, It works just as well with USB's as TF cards.

GitHub repo

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.

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.

Little known fact, Disk Manager comes with almost every distro, and works just fine.

I curious because I don't have the skill to test it myself but can you just manually copy everything to USB it's just work?

No, the drive needs a boot partition for the bios to know there is something to be booted on the drive.

Most Linux ISO's do properly include the partitions in the ISO, so you can clone the iso to a drive and that should work, using dd for example. But just copying the files won't work.

iirc windows iso's did use to support just creating a fat32 partition and moving all the files over, not sure how they managed that. But now the international ISO for win 11 has a file that's more than the max 4Gb allowed by fat32, so you can't do that anymore either.

No idea if this exists for Linux, but there's a program for Windows called GuiFormat that allows formatting of larger thumb drives to be fat32.

That's not the only issue, fat32 also has a hard limit on single file size. The largest a single file can be is 4GiB, and afaik you just can't get around that with fat.

iirc, the way windows deals with this in its media creation tool is that it strips out locales and other things you don't need, based on the options you selected previously, so the file ends up being small enough to fit.

Dunno how GuiFormat gets around those limitations (something to do with block sizes, I think), but I've never had any trouble with it.

There's better options than fat32, anyway, just pointing out that the 4GB limit has a workaround, and YMMV.

In the general case, no, but there are some rare specific cases where that does work.

If you're trying to produce Linux media that will boot on a single-board computer that has an onboard bootloader, like a Pi 4, you can indeed just partition the target medium and copy the files manually (been there, done that, working with a custom Gentoo install with no ISO).

If the bootloader has to be on the target medium (as it would for a desktop or laptop), then that won't work unless you also do a manual bootloader install after copying everything. Not impossible, but at that point you're hitting the level of complexity where it's easier to figure out the correct dd command.

(As for Windows? Don't even bother. It hates being worked on with anything but its own tools.)

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.