Hacker News Reader

Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

I find it amusing if not a bit sad that the best utility for making bootable Linux flash drives is currently on Windows instead of Linux. The current state of making bootable USB drives on linux is actually quite crappy. UNetbootin used to be a good option but has stopped working on a lot of distros. Etcher.io worked great for a while, but has also stopped working for most situations. The built-in disk image creator in ubuntu flavors works, but only for certain situations.

But at least good ole Rufus works :) Wish we could get something like Rufus (or even better, YUMMI) working perfectly on Linux

View on HN

probably because on most linux distros provide an image (iso) that can simply be written on any media and boots.

like: cat ubuntu.iso >/dev/sdd

dd if=./ubuntu.iso of=/dev/sdd

Or you can go the GUI way, and use for instance gnome-disks to write the image to the disk (which also reduces the chance of writing to the wrong disk; when writing through the command line, I prefer to use the /dev/disk/by-path symlinks for that reason).

> I prefer to use the /dev/disk/by-path symlinks for that reason

That was a neat trick. Thank you for mentioning it.

Right but if you select the wrong /dev device, you just wiped your drive. GUI tools will auto select "the usb one" typically. Also tools like YUMI can make things like a multiboot drive with 50 different linux distros on one drive and set up things like persistent disk space for the ubuntu distributions and can set up WindowsToGo drives. Not sure how to do that with cat / dd.

What is wrong with just using dd?

To tag on, what's wrong with plain ol' cat or cp?

dd can do seek, skip, re-block. It's unusual to need the features but they exist for good reasons. I used dd to transfer 4.1BSD release tapes to a vax 11/720 via rl02 10meg pack and reconstruct the chunks on the receive side, long ago.

ddrescue will do this for you automatically to recover from a bad block.

Not everyone is comfortable using the command line or even knows that dd exists.

I know it exists but I don't trust it as most tools say "write in ISO mode (recommended) or dd mode (not recommended)"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com