Booting ISO images from a USB disk

A new la entry has been added:

Booting ISO images from a USB disk

BE CAREFUL NOT TO OVERWRITE THE MBR OR BOOTLOADER ON YOUR PRIMARY BOOT DISK! BACK THEM UP BEFORE YOU BEGIN THIS PROCESS! Here is a detailed example of how to make a bootable USB disk: What you will need: Hardware:[LIST][*]A USB disk large enough to hold the .iso image (which may be compressed using gzip or zip)[*]A device which has a BIOS capable of booting from USB.

vzv -vvvvvvvvvr

Thank you

That's a very nice writeup, but seems like a lot of work to do something that can be done with one line of code on my FreeBSD box.

Insert your USB stick and make sure it is NOT mounted. Use the cd command to change directories to where the .iso is you want to work with, then run:

# dd if=./nameof.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=512k

I've used that command to make bootable USB sticks with Debian and Kali .iso files on several occasions. Of course, the syntax for where the USB stick resides will be different on Linux (sda2 maybe?) but I don't know why it wouldn't work.

Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Originally Posted by Trihexagonal That's a very nice writeup, but seems like a lot of work to do something that can be done with one line of code on my FreeBSD box. Insert your USB stick and make sure it is NOT mounted. Use the cd command to change directories to where the .iso is you want to work with, then run: # dd if=./nameof.iso of=/dev/da0 bs=512k I've used that command to make bootable USB sticks with Debian and Kali .iso files on several occasions. Of course, the syntax for where the USB stick resides will be different on Linux (sda2 maybe?) but I don't know why it wouldn't work. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

when I use this dd thingy -- and am in the same dir as the iso - I do not use that ./ leading I just

dd if=NameOf.ios of=/dev/sdxx && sync

works Okey Dokey for me. just saves two key strokes is all leaving out the ./

The original post was from 2012.