The Image Is Too Big For The Selected Target Rufus

[Kensel Whiteman]

BasicallyI require different Live USBs for different needs. I have a single USB drive & when I need to switch to another distro/OS, I simply flash this USB drive with the right boot attributes, using Rufus.

I thought whatever Rufus flashes to the USB drive, I might catch as a disk image & have it not just preserve the needed boot attributes, but also be as close of a binary copy. From then on, I'll be using another flasher that writes the disk image in a RAW manner, one that does not save any bootloaders files to the USB drive. With nothing to configure, how can I mess it up? Is the idea.

How do I set about to do this?First thing that comes to mind is using a virtual USB flash drive that is writable, so Rufus will write to a disk image. Though, I've yet to find a virtual USB flash drive software.

Rufus can create an uncompressed VHD image from whichever drive you have currently selected, which, for all intent and purposes can be used as a regular DD image (because the only difference with a regular DD image is an extra 512-byte footer, which, no matter how much you may think otherwise, will NEVER EVER come in the way of using the .vhd as a .img).

Solution 2: Prepare your own hybrid ISO. Most of modern Linux distros use so called hybrid ISOs. They are valid ISOs that can be burned to a CD/DVD, but at the same time they are valid disk images that can be written to a flash drive. For example you could feed an Ubuntu ISO to Win32DiskImager and have it write it to disk (Rufus may offer this feature for some ISOs, it calls it "dd mode"). Community documentation on ISO customization is ten to thirteen years old, but may still be useful and you'll find many useful guides all over the Internet.

If I use the MBR partition scheme for UEFI, the server will not recognize the boot drive. Win32DiskImager and Etcher did not work either. I also used IPMI to mount the ISO but it still wasn't recognized.

Does Sophos have an ISO that is EFI bootable? I am using a new SuperMicro SuperServer E200-9A. Their support says I must use a EFI bootable ISO and GPT partition scheme. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

Suffice to say that the USB sticks (two of them) I used had no problem booting on that machine with other ISO images, Win, Linux, FreeBSD. Also that the ISO image of SFOS has no problem booting on both my desktop and my laptop, burnt on a USB stick or a DVD-ROM.

I concluded that (and if you pay attention to the screenshots from the link you provided, as it happened the exact same way in my case, Rufus opens at first with the default option "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI", and after the SFOS image is selected, that option changes to "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM". Which means that) the SFOS ISO image is not at all UEFI compatible, and it needs a CSM (Compatibility Support Module) to be able to boot from. More so, even if you manually try to force "MBR partition scheme for UEFI" or "GPT partition scheme for UEFI" options, Rufus returns an error stating:

I did manage to boot from USB stick, eventually, using "AIO Boot" which loads grub2, and then included the SFOS ISO in the boot options menu, to be able to further select it to continue booting from it, but with no success. Tried every possible and impossible combination of ISO writing tools and UEFI BIOS settings on that hardware (most of them hints from similar situations returned from G Search), meaning Rufus with or without XHCI, with and without CSM enabled, and with CSM enabled, with and without storage compatibility mode set to Legacy, then UEFI, made sure that secure boot is disabled... then Etcher with or without XHCI, with and without CSM enabled, and with CSM enabled, with and without storage compatibility mode set to Legacy, then UEFI, made sure that secure boot is disabled... then AIO Boot with or without XHCI, with and without CSM enabled, and with CSM enabled, with and without storage compatibility mode set to Legacy, then UEFI, made sure that secure boot is disabled... and what not!?!?! I even tried with converted "IMGpart" and "partIMG" formats of SFOS ISO file. No success either. Several many hours, in 3 different days...

So, if somebody could provide a full UEFI compatible ISO image, one which would not change Rufus default write mode from "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI" in "MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI-CSM", and which would not return an error when trying UEFI target type, please do.

Thank you very much!

Just to throw in my two cents, I was able to make a little progress by removing the m2 SSD from my E200-9A, placing it in a laptop, and installing XG from there, then moving the SSD back to the E200-9A.

This doesn't seem like an option, messing around with HW setups in countless hours of slaloms between and around errors, when all you wanna do is get the SW installed in a few minutes, then better use all that previously wasted time to setup, test and etc. the (new) firewall.

It might be cheap as in free for home users, it might be evaluated for 30 days for businesses, but in the end of the day, if my boss get to hear from me about Sophos, and what a cool and marvelous piece of software it is, but also finds out that I have to struggle for days/ weeks with installation on (too) newer HW, he will seriously rise at least an eyebrow toward my marketing/ sales pitch! :(

I know that BIOS is one thing, (U)EFI is another, CSM is a bridge in between, a transition tool, and maybe it's not Sophos' fault that every now and then, on some hardware/ UEFI BIOS the CSM is not implemented as it should, or maybe there are some bugs, but hey!... There are only two variants of BIOSes, the old (replaceable) one, and the new (replacing) one: please, Sophos, make available two standard variants of ISO images, for each of the two standards, and forget about CSM, that might be buggy and/ or mall implemented sometimes. It shouldn't be difficult, and it's hard for me to imagine the image points you get from both the working hats as well as from buying hats! :)

I say, if it's a software treat it like a software, otherwise tell me you only offer ISOs for Sophos proprietary HW. And, honestly, I don't thing UEFI compatibility matter is something one should/ worth research for! (!)

For the final time: I don't argue about making images which shouldn't have flaws and bugs no matter the piece of bare metal those images are installed on. It would be out of this universe. But what about making an ISO which is able to boot if the BIOS is UEFI BIOS, where USB is XHCI type (and v. 3++) and there is no CSM present - which for me, if I'm not wrong, means "standard UEFI", and no Windows OS only quirks?!?! :)

You will then be alerted that Rufus has detected that the Ubuntu ISO is an ISOHybrid image. This means the same image file can be used as the source for both a DVD and a USB stick without requiring conversion.

The ISO will now be written to your USB stick, and the progress bar in Rufus will give you some indication of where you are in the process. With a reasonably modern machine, this should take around 10 minutes. Total elapsed time is shown in the lower right corner of the Rufus window.

When Rufus has finished writing the USB device, the Status bar will be filled green and the word READY will appear in the center. Select CLOSE to complete the write process.

To use it you need to insert the stick into your target PC or laptop and reboot the device. It should recognise the installation media automatically during startup but you may need to hold down a specific key (usually F12) to bring up the boot menu and choose to boot from USB.

Rufus developer here. @kirkru is 100% right, there is absolutely no point in selecting FreeDOS or changing the Partition scheme or Target system options because these will be reset as soon as you select the Ubuntu ISO.

Finally recent versions of Rufus have added persistence support, so you will see an extra set of fields allowing you to set the size of the persistent partition (with a default of 0 meaning no persistence).

Great tutorial. Everything worked perfectly overall.

In this video I have Just explained, how to make one usb drive bootable for all windows like 7, 8, 8.1 and windows 10.and symantec Ghost.

After view this video you can make single usb drive bootable for all windows.

Also: I have heard others had more success with balenaEtcher than Rufus. It also has the benefit of being cross platform, reducing the amount of documentation that needs to be maintained. I should also point out that Ubuntu MATE recommends it for Windows.

Be extremely careful when writing pfSense software installation images! Ifthe client PC contains other hard drives it is possible to select the wrongdrive and overwrite a portion of that drive with the installer disk. Thisrenders the disk completely unreadable except to certain disk recoveryprograms, if at all.

The easiest way to create bootable installation media is to use Etcher.Etcher is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux so the procedure to write animage is the same across each supported platform. Etcher is simple to use,supports compressed image files, and has several features which help preventusers from making unintentional mistakes in the process such as selecting thewrong target drive. Additionally, unlike other methods there is no need toperform other steps before writing the image to prepare the image file or disk.

Etcher attempts to hide and/or visibly mark potentially dangerousselections such as system drives, the drive containing the source image,and large drives. This makes it easier to identify the correct selection.

Etcher requires elevated privileges to write USB drives. In the majority ofcases, Etcher will trigger an operating system prompt for additionalprivileges as needed. If it does not, re-run Etcher as an administratorexplicitly.

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