Unable to boot a supposedly bootable usb stick

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

My hard drive is going bad, so I swapped it out for another temporary one to use in making a bootable thumb drive to install OpenSUSE on a new drive I just bought. This temporary drive has an old and defective version of Mandriva (Yeeech!) installed and can’t be upgraded or added to, so I’m limited to dd and fdisk.

The thumbdrive I’m using was recognised as a non-bootable drive when booting the OS - *until *I used dd to install the iso on it. Now with it plugged in the computer just boots into Mandriva without recognising the existence of the plugged in thumbdrive.

Once fully booted up I can mount the thumbdrive and view its contents.

fdisk -l does NOT work on this system. So I use fdisk /dev/sdb, then p to print this info:

**fdisk /dev/sdb**

  The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4244.

 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): **p**

  Disk /dev/sdb: 4016 MB, 4016045568 bytes
 33 heads, 56 sectors/track, 4244 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 1848 * 512 = 946176 bytes
 Disk identifier: 0xcee0ec63
     Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/sdb1   *           1        4245     3921919    b  W95 FAT32

Note that the boot flag is set. The thing with the cylinders is a mystery to me. The command I used to write the iso (as root, not sudo) is:

dd if=/home/russ/OpenSUSE/openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M && shutdown -r now

It writes just fine, then reboots - straight back into Mandriva. What to do?

#2

There’s the mistake.

Use:


dd if=/home/russ/OpenSUSE/openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

That is to say, the output needs to go to the device ("/dev/sdb"), not to the partition ("/dev/sdb1").

The message about cylinders is probably a side effect of using an old version of “fdisk”.

#3

On 2014-04-23 13:06, rwbehne1 wrote:

>
> Note that the boot flag is set. The thing with the cylinders is a
> mystery to me. The command I used to write the iso (as root, not sudo)
> is:
>
> Code:
> --------------------
> dd if=/home/russ/OpenSUSE/openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M && shutdown -r now
> --------------------
>
>
> It writes just fine, then reboots - straight back into Mandriva. What to
> do?

Remove that “one” of the sdb write command. You have to write to the
whole device, not to one partition. And of course, the partition table
and boot marks will be destroyed, as intended.

If you prefer, you can simply use:


cp /home/russ/OpenSUSE/openSUSE-13.1-KDE-Live-x86_64.iso /dev/sdb

That is, assuming “/dev/sdb” is the usb stick you want to use for
creating the install device - if you mistake the target device, that
other device gets destroyed instead.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)