Linux boot media need not be tricky! In today's episode, I'll talk about four ways to flash an ISO from Windows (and other systems too). I know a lot of you are switching to Linux because of Micros...
Not everyone likes to use commands for something as trivial as this, its nice to press a couple buttons and wait for it to be done vs learning how dd works and what arguments to use etc.
Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)
Not everyone likes to install compicated graphical software which does a thousand and one things it shouldn’t do just to copy files to an external drive
I really don’t get why I should use anything else than dd
“What, you guys don’t spend money in several external ssds?”
– this guy
What? You can use dd to read/write any block storage device (or file)
Fear?
Not everyone likes to use commands for something as trivial as this, its nice to press a couple buttons and wait for it to be done vs learning how dd works and what arguments to use etc.
My favorite way to create a boot media is simply to use cat. No arguments, no shenanigans just a cat into the device :
cat debian.iso > /dev/sda
iirc there was a reason you should use dd instead of directly copying the data, I think something to do with device block alignment or something?
Replace cat with pv to get a progress bar for free
One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with
sudo
as-is, unlikedd
.Yep that’s right, but I use fdisk to check my drives before writing on them and it also requires sudo…
Right, I just meant that you can’t
sudo cat file > /dev/sda
but you cansudo dd ...
, because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)Oh right, my bad x) I agree, it’s a little bit akward to use su then cat everytime.
Not everyone likes to install compicated graphical software which does a thousand and one things it shouldn’t do just to copy files to an external drive