Can't boot from USB thumb drive, suse 11.2

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Downloaded SuSE 11.2 KDE live iso. MD5 checksum okay. Loaded the iso file to a thumb drive using “dd if=(iso file path) of=(/def/sd_) bs=4M”. Attempted to boot a netbook computer, nothing. Attempted to look at the thumb drive, nothing, it doesn’t mount. “fdisk” indicates it has an error that is correctable by writing. Writing changes nothing. The thumb drive will not mount, and can’t be read by Windows.

I was able to repair the drive by creating a FAT partition with “fdisk”, and formating this with Windows XP.

Of note: I was successful in loading SuSE 11.2 KDE RC1 several weeks ago.

Any help would be appreciated.

2

How did you look at the USB drive? If not automounted, it shall be mounted as a CD:

mount -t iso9660 -r -o loop /dev/sdb1 /mnt

Re-create a bootable USB in a Linux. I have done this with several memory sticks; all worked.

Could you change the boot sequence in laptop’s BIOS? It is often not easy with laptops.

Why not try the memory stick on a desktop?

3

I went through the steps and got a bootable drive.
I think what happened before is the following:

linux-3ar1:/home//download/openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686-iso # dd if=openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M
169+1 records in
169+1 records out
710934528 bytes (711 MB) copied, 98.2749 s, 7.2 MB/s
linux-3ar1:/home//download/openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686-iso # fdisk /dev/sdc

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 7643.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:

  1. software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
  2. booting and partitioning software from other OSs
    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): q

The number of cylinders message disturbed me, and I did a “w” instead of “q”.

The main guide talks about adding a Linux partition to store data onto the bootable thumb drive. I will give it a try after I upgrade the netbook.

Thanks for your help.

4

Hello,

I had the same problem.

However, I found two different instructions to create the usb image. One is the same you pasted above, the other was:

dd if=openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=32k

I’m new to linux and I do not have much experience with dd, but this one worked fine, the only difference is the bs=23k.