Re: Conviently having netinst.iso on a 32GB flash drive

[songbird <songbird@anthive.com>]

Richard Owlett wrote:
> Currently I use
>> dd if=netinst.iso bs=64M of=/dev/sdb
>
> I would like way to copy it such that:
> 1. a legacy BIOS could launch it
> 2. Gparted would not complain about block size
> 3. there would be at least two partitions usable misc files


  one of the nice people here posted a program for doing this 
called make_isombr_part (or something similar).  see if you
can find it.  archive search for this group Feb-Mar 2017.

  i have two versions of it now, but it was a five years ago and
i don't recall if i made the changes or got a new version from
the author.  :)

  my somewhat incomplete notes look like:

=====
This program makes the rest of a USB stick available
to create another partition after you put an ISO image
on a USB stick.

the whole thing goes like:

  1. download netinst, or some other ISO image

  2. cp it to the USB stick (to the whole device)

   example:  (check for right device before clobbering)

#  cp /home/me/IWDownloads/debian-stretch-DI-rc2-i386-netinst.iso /dev/sd<X>


  3. add boot loader (syslinux)


  4.  make isombr partition


usage: ./make_isombr_part /dev/sd<X> auto 83 dry_run

remove dry_run when you actually want the changes to be made.

  5. create file system on what remains

# mkfs.ext4 -v -b 2048 -L FD02 /dev/sd<x><partition_number>

=====


  songbird