USB Installation

alibab · February 15, 2010, 9:40am

Hi,
this weekend was a pain. I wanted to install openSuse 11.2. The problem was, that the dvd was scratched and I did not notice. So my installation failed and I had no working os and no other pc to burn the image once more (and even no other empty dvd).

So I booted from the scratched dvd into rescue mode which luckily worked and wanted to create a usb installation media.
What I did was a first a

dd if=<dvdisofile.iso> of=/dev/sdb bs=4M;sync

Which did not work. Then I tried

dd if=<dvdisofile.iso> of=/dev/sdb bs=4M

Which also did not work. Then I tried

dd if=<dvdisofile.iso> of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M

Which also did not work! Then I gave up. Today I burned a new dvd in my company and am currently installing everything once again.

I created a LiveUSB-Stick from openSuSE one month ago and it worked well. What did I do wrong this time? Or is it not possible to create a USB-installation media from the dvd image?

lOtz1009 · February 15, 2010, 9:44am

Exactly. That “dd”-way only works with Live-Images

alibab · February 15, 2010, 12:47pm

Is there a way to create a usb installation media?

lOtz1009 · February 15, 2010, 12:50pm

In fact, you can use the live images for installation.

alibab · February 15, 2010, 1:15pm

Thx. Will take into account next time

knurpht · February 15, 2010, 3:38pm

Yes there is. Make an USB-stick bootable with mkbootdisk, copy contents of the DVD to another partition and point the syslinux.cfg to the partition containing the DVD content. This requires quite some manual work, so I suggest you follow the instructions for a Live-CD to USB disk.