How To Make Usb Bootable Red Hat Linux
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I have specific Linux installed on SSD drive. What I want to do is to copy all ext4 partition files to other drive (also ext4) and make it bootable. Copy should be as similar as possible differentiating only in partition size and physical location of the files.
Another option could be to run a FOG Server on the network (a PXE backup server). This one would allow you to backup the disk to another system (a 3rd computer, or even a VM if you want to), then restore the backup from the 1st computer to the 2nd computer. When you create the image, make it re-sizable, this way you could restore it to a smaller disk.
Step1: Create Bootable USB Drive for Linux. Start PowerISO (v6.5 or newer version, down load here). ...Step 2: Configuring the BIOS. You have to now reboot and go into the BIOS configuration to boot from USB. ...Step 3: Booting and setup or run Linux from USB drive.
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There are a lot of tools to help you create a bootable USB drive, such as Ventoy, Rufus, Etcher, dd, Fedora Media Writer, Popsicle, and more. The one tool I've used for years is UNetbootin, which is available for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. You can easily install UNetbootin by downloading the executable file to your desktop and running it. (It installs like most applications on both MacOS and Windows.)
Make sure USB Drive is selected in the Type dropdown and then choose the name of your USB drive from the Drive dropdown. Select the right drive because UNetbootin will erase everything on the drive you choose. I would suggest removing all external drives except the one that will serve as your bootable drive.
When the process completes, click Exit, safely eject the USB drive, and you're ready. You can now insert the USB drive into the machine that will serve as your new Linux desktop, boot the machine, and start installing the operating system.
I have 2 machines - a MacBook Pro and a desktop running Fedora, I have a USB drive and a OSX 10.8 dmg. The MacBook won't boot into OSX unfortunately, I'm trying to make a bootable mac usb to recover it.
Note: sdX is an example, you will have to check your flash drive address (usually sdb if you have only one hard disk). Do not add a partition # after that (such as sdb1). This method is a little hard on flash drives (I have killed one or two doing this relatively frequently, but once should be fine).
I have a (non-UEFI) Gentoo Linux system, and I am preparing a hard drive for another system. I have prepared partitions for the new system, and now I want to make it bootable. I remembed that in legacy GRUB, I used these commands:
Just doing grub-install won't be enough, you will have to update-grub or grub-mkconfig unless you have your own initial grub.cfg. I have to run this from a chroot jail for it to work. Here is a snippet adapted from a script I wrote to do this (altered form is untested):
I have watch some videos and looked online. But using both fdisk and cfdisk, I can't find the option to make the partition boootable. In cfdisk, the [bootable] button is not there in when I try "a" in fdisk I am told that this is an unknown command.
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EDIT: fdisk recognizes if the disk is not MBR(i.e. GPT) formatted and disables MBR options. Even the help message changes accordingly.
So if the 'a' option is not available this might not be a MBR partition table
I have a bootable Linux on a 2 GB USB stick with 770 MB used, and another stick that is 1 GB.The aim is to put the files on the 1 GB stick and make it boot properly into Linux and run the software copied from the 2 GB stick.
The hard part is that there is no ISO to start with. And of course if I create an ISO or dd image from the original, it will be 2 GB and so will not fit on the 1 GB stick. So that seems to rule out using unetbootin, doesn't it?
My goal is so simple, the title says it all, but every way I've tried, I've failed. I've read instructions on various sites (besides here) and they all seem to be missing something... this is what I have:
Though I can easily create a bootable Windows 10 USB with Rufus, my goal is more educational: I want to understand what is going on, and what is the source of my failure, and if possible, to make it work.
This is confusing the heck out of me. I know that I'd save myself the trouble if I just stayed with Rufus, but this is not about going simple, but about understanding what is going on. I know a few GUI tools on Linux might solve the problem, but, again, my hope is to do it using the old Unix terminal if possible. if it's not possible, then I'd like to know why.
What way too many people fail to understand, because Linux ISOs are applying this method, but this is essentially a MAJOR HACK CALLED 'ISOHYBRID', is that, in most cases, you cannot simply take an ISO image and copy it byte for byte to a USB drive, and expect that to boot.
That is because the ISO format and the underlying file systems it uses (ISO9660 or UDF) are designed for optical boot, which is a completely different beast from regular HDD or USB boot. For one thing optical media, and therefore (regular) ISO images, don't have a partition table, which is (usually) essential for HDD or USB boot, and they also (usually) don't have a Master Boot record, a.k.a. MBR, which is essential for BIOS boot.
Now, the above only works when the secondary bootloaders (i.e. the ones that comes from Windows and which Rufus doesn't modify) are designed to support both optical and regular boot, which typically mean they need to handle both UDF or ISO9660 and FAT32 or NTFS file systems, as well as the other differences that present themselves when booting from disk vs from optical. But Microsoft did design its bootloader precisely for that, which is the smart thing to do, because, if your target system is UEFI, it means you (usually, as long as the 4 GB max filesize issue of FAT32 doesn't rear its ugly head) don't need a utility to convert an ISO to a bootable USB, but you can just format that USB to FAT32 and copy the ISO files onto it (file copy, not byte copy), and you have a bootable media.
And now that we have gone through all of the above, I can get into a rant and explain why I believe that the Linux distro maintainers, who usually are smarter than that, are actually doing some disservice to their users, even as they are trying to help them:
Almost all recent Linux distros use a MAJOR HACK called "IsoHybrid", where someone managed to figure out a way to make an ISO9660 optical image masquerade as a regular disk image, with a partition table, an MBR and everything... In other words, most Linux ISOs you find these days are abusing the ISO9660 file system to make it look like something it was never designed to look like: a dual disk and optical image.
Obviously, the goal is to create an ISO that can also be used with the dd command, even as an ISO should never be able to work that way. And I agree that, in theory, this sounds awesome, because being able to use a single image for completely different uses should be great for users, but in practice, this leads to issues that are often overlooked:
As far as I know, Microsoft have no plans to switch to the "hack" that is ISOHybrid for their Windows ISOs, which means that you're unlikely to ever be able to use dd to create a bootable USB media from it, and therefore, if you want to create Windows bootable media from an ISO you either:
Used the insights here as motivation to find a way to build a Windows Server 2019 bootable USB drive from Mac OS. The catch is that you need a GPT formatted disk as FAT32 and there are limitations around 4GB max filesize that you need to work around using wimlib-imagex extension. I originally tried using dd utility - but quickly realized that the disk format could not be used for WinOS boot.
Recently I wanted to create a bootable USB of Linux mint. I found that there was a lot of conflicting advice/experience about whether the 'dd' command could be used to create a bootable USB. I decided to download an ISO and try. While dd definitely put the image on the USB stick it was not bootable. So my question is what is the magic ingredient that will make this work or why has this approach persisted if it does not work?
The actual mechanism varies a bit depending on the type of image you're using, but for simple DOS/MBR images you need to get a correct partition table (with the bootable partition marked as being bootable, and the MBR - the part of the initial 512 bytes that isn't the partition table - containing initial boot code.
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