ONE on a 16GB thumb drive
 

Ernie posted this in response to another question, and I wanted to try this since it seems I have the worst luck in the world keeping a computer operating :o

Anyway, here's the quote:
"New with Mandriva 2009.1 (Spring) is the fact that the Mandriva One iso image is a 'hybrid' image file that can be burnt to a CD or DVD disk as an iso image but it can also be copied to a USB Flash Drive as if it were an img file using the dd command from a command prompt in Linux. I have not tried this, but I believe you should be able to use rawrite in windows."

Can anyone give me a link to a tutorial for this? Thanks!

I imagine it would go something like this:

1. Plug in your USB mass storage device.
2. See what block device it is. (See output of dmesg. It should be something like /dev/sdb.)
3. Use dd to put the image on said block device (as root):
   
   Code:

   ---

   dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdb

   ---

4. Reboot your system with the USB drive plugged-in, having appropriately configured your BIOS to boot from USB.

After reading the directions from Mandriva in the MDV-2009.1-rc2 posting, I created the following command line:

dd if=/home/$USER/mandriva-linux-one-2009.1-KDE4-europe1-americas-cdrom-i586.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

A breakdown of the command above follows:

dd - the name of the program that will be used to write the contents of the file to the uSB thumb drive

if= - input file (The source file or device containing data to be written)
Note1: /home/$USER should be replaced with the actual path to the source file.
Note2: mandriva-linux-one-2009.1-KDE4-europe1-americas-cdrom-i586.iso should be replaced with the actual name of the iso image you will use as the source file.

of= - output file (The destination file or device to which data will be written)
Note3: /dev/sdb should be replaced with the actual device node for your USB thumb drive

bs=BYTES - read ans write BYTES bytes at a time (Mandriva directed to write 8M bytes at a time)

See the dd manual page (man dd) for more complete usage information

Hmm… I wonder if this is absolutely necessary or was suggested by the Mandriva people because 8M is a naturally fast buffer size for usb-storage devices.

Ernie,
As usual, you are da bomb diggity. Thank you!