Hi,
In my daily work I'm mainly using USB keys for work : one with CentOS 7, one with OpenSUSE Leap 15.1, one with Slax Live for data recovery purposes, one with Ghost4Linux and one with FreeDOS which I use for flashing the odd BIOS.
Last week I bought a set of three flashy colored USB keys in a local shop. To my surprise, none of them seem to be able to boot anything. When I write a bootable image (CentOS, OpenSUSE, whatever) to any one of the USB keys, the USB key boot option doesn't show up on any one of my sandbox PCs. Looks like I just learnt the hard way that some USB keys can't be used for installation purposes.
As far as I can tell, I need a set of 8 GB keys so the biggest image, the CentOS 8 ISO, can fit. Can you recommend a no-nonsense USB key brand which I can use to make a set of USB installation keys ?
Cheers,
Niki
Nicolas Kovacs info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Last week I bought a set of three flashy colored USB keys in a local shop. To my surprise, none of them seem to be able to boot anything.
I think the problem is unlikely to be the flash drives themselves. However, I've had good luck with SanDisk Ultra.
"Key" is a gallicism. ;-)
On 6/19/20 9:48 AM, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
In my daily work I'm mainly using USB keys for work : one with CentOS 7, one with OpenSUSE Leap 15.1, one with Slax Live for data recovery purposes, one with Ghost4Linux and one with FreeDOS which I use for flashing the odd BIOS.
Last week I bought a set of three flashy colored USB keys in a local shop. To my surprise, none of them seem to be able to boot anything. When I write a bootable image (CentOS, OpenSUSE, whatever) to any one of the USB keys, the USB key boot option doesn't show up on any one of my sandbox PCs. Looks like I just learnt the hard way that some USB keys can't be used for installation purposes.
As far as I can tell, I need a set of 8 GB keys so the biggest image, the CentOS 8 ISO, can fit. Can you recommend a no-nonsense USB key brand which I can use to make a set of USB installation keys ?
Cheers,
Niki
I have had no issues with the install ISO using dd from linux to copy directly to the device. Something like:
dd if=./<name.iso> of=/dev/sd<letter> bs=4M status=progress
Where 'of=' is the device // make sure NOT to use a separate partition (so /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1, but the whole device when copying the install isos.
If you are trying to do something else (create a bootable actual partition that runs from usb .. that should also be possible, but harder :)
Le 19/06/2020 à 17:01, Johnny Hughes a écrit :
dd if=./<name.iso> of=/dev/sd<letter> bs=4M status=progress
Where 'of=' is the device // make sure NOT to use a separate partition (so /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1, but the whole device when copying the install isos.
I'm positive that the problem here is *not* the procedure (which I've done countless times).
I can take any one of my old flash drives, write bootable images on them (CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, whatever) and they boot fine.
But these new no-name flash drives I just bought, they just won't work. Anything else will. They won't. So I'm 100 % sure this is a hardware problem.
Niki
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Johnny Hughes -
Nicolas Kovacs -
Yves Bellefeuille