This should not be this hard.
I've done this before, and every time its this circular hell, where i try the proper method documented everywhere, and it fails, over and over again, and then i eventually find some way to make it work.

I'm attempting to do this with dd, from a fedora workstation.
I've downloaded the fedora i686 live iso. The documented procedure is:

dd if=Fedora.iso of=/dev/sdx (sdc being my usb stick).

I do this, and it gives me an unbootable usb stick.

If i use libeusb creator, or unetbootin, it refuses to acknoledge my usb drive unless it has a fat32 partition on it. And then it target's /dev/sdx1. If i use one of these tools to create the disk, i ALSO end up with an unbootable usb.

My USB stick has been through a lot, various partitions and live os's. MacOS installer, various fedora liveusb's, even ubuntu. So its possible that the partition table, or whatever, is somehow getting in the way, but i've tried various methods of completely wiping the usb and starting from scratch, none have done the trick.

Right now i'm doing a:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx
in an effort to nuke the whole thing and start again.

What is the proper procedure to prepare this usb stick for use (as a destination for a liveusb) once it's finished?

Thanks!

Looks ok, if slow. Maybe you yank the USB out before it has finished. Try this instead - if forces each write to USB immediately

Refuses to boot? Exactly what happens?

Run syslinux to it once. I'll agree that the dd to device ought to work. Guess the drive could be bad. Some bios entry issue.

You forgot one step. Download iso. THEN test download md5 or shal!

the iso checks out. I can boot a VM off of it, ant it boots to the live desktop.


It wont boot, as it, it tells me that the device is not bootable.

That says to me BIOS - has any USB ever booted on that particular machine ?.

A fair question. In this case I'm trying to use the fedora live USB to recover a server of unknown quality. It's very possible that the system is the problem. However, it's also not working on my laptop, a macbook pro. The issue there could be the uefi bios. At work tomorrow in going to grab a dell laptop to do more accurate testing on.