I got into a rather animated discussion about what method to use burning an .iso onto a flashdrive. Personally, I D/l the .iso and use a program such as Rufus-Unetbootin-LiLi-or any of many other .iso/bootable flashdrive programs. An opposing and very adamant view stated I MUST get the .iso, burn it to a CD/DVD, then use the CD/DVD to burn it to the flashdrive. So, what method do you use and why? In responding, please give good, solid reasonable answers and, if possible, "links" to validate your viewpoint.

Thank You;

Rick

what, huh? burn it to a CD then use that CD to burn it to a USB Stick???? why?

RE: BW-userx

My exact same question to the person whom insisted I must do it that way. Why...I D K?

Rick

it is one or the other. I use a usb stick because its easier and reusable.

with bsd and debian I have just used dd bs=4M if=the.iso of=/dev/sdX
as per the instructions
https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb

But they are specially crafted iso


but I agree, the logic of burning to Optical in order to put on flash is bizarre

the only reason I can think of is manually partitioning the flash, putting filesystems on and copying files to the flash and installing a bootloader

but that could be done by loop mounting the iso, no need to burn.



regards bsd, I may have recalled that incorrectly
https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook...bsdinstall-usb
they have a specific img for usb

At one time I thought the Fedora media writer application was only available from the DVD. There might be other distributions that have a USB media creation software included on live DVD, Mint or Ubuntu maybe.

Most of then mainstream distros documentation installation guide seem to include what applications are known to work the best.

I guess some confusion could have arised from liveCD with persistent storage
or using the install CD/DVD to install a working system to the usb

That is complete nonsense, I strongly suspect you misunderstood sth there.
Esp. given your long history of not "getting" USB with persistence.

Probably because they don't understand the difference between "burning" a CD/DVD, and writing an ISO image to a USB stick.

@69Rixter, as you've probably already been told at least a couple of times now; you "burn" a ISO image to a CD/DVD because they are optical media and the "burner" uses a laser to actually "burn" the data onto the disc. Whereas, you use a software program to "write" the same ISO image to a USB stick - which is NOT optical media.

Why do you find that so hard to understand 69Rixter ? It's not as if you have to build your own CD/DVD burner, let alone write your own USB imaging software...

You can create a disk image from an .iso file without burning the .iso to optical media, you would just need to mount the .iso as a virtual disc and proceed from there. There used to be a complex procedure to create USB flash installation media in OpenBSD, but that's no longer necessary as *.fs images have existed for quite a few years and it's been a simple matter of e.g.:

To my knowledge Linux distributions have provided "isohybrid" images for years, which can either be burnt to optical media or written to USB flash? So either way I can see no reason to burn optical media / mount an .iso as a virtual disc first.

//edit:

https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index...shell_commands

This is what I do. Or use balena etcher if I'm too lazy to type.

RE: Timothy Miller

I'm still laughing at your response. TY!!! BTW...could you be a "Cats" fan? I am !!!

RICK

Not sure why this program was funny: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I guess it would depend on the distro and if I wanted it live or real install.

I do keep some DVD-RAM disc's around just for burning to. Doesn't make sense to use disposable disc's.

Maybe because it wraps a several-hundred-megabyte full fledged, not updateable, chromium browser with all the scurity and other problems that entails, around a few kilobytes of code actually doing things?