On Sat, 06 Jan 2024 12:53:29 -0500, William Unruh <
unruh@invalid.ca> wrote:
I tried to create an install usb stick for Mga9. I did it both using dd
and using isodumper (too bad that there is no man page for the latter--
there really should be).
The resultant usb was weird. It had apparently two partition, as
evidenced by the /dev/sda{,1,2} listings. If I ran gparted on it I
simply got a blank as if there was nothing on the usb stick. No
partitions, or anything. If I mounted /dev/sda1, I got a mounted
partition with lots in it. If I ran fdisk on it, I got that there were
two partitions, which gparted never saw. I also got a warning from fdisk
that it had detected and iso format and a write would overwrite it. (Ie,
and incomprehensible to me warning. I finally used fdisk to create a
third partion of Linux type to take up the extra 25GB or soon the usb
stick.
Now gparted suddenly saw three partitions, and empty one of about 4GB, a small one of about 4 MiB fat16 MGAISO-ESP name and a 25GB unknown type.
Is it a bug in gparted that it saw nothing in the first instance?
Is it a bug that it sees the 4GB partition as unallocated when it
clearly is allocated.
Did my putting on a third partition to use the excess space on the USB
ruin it as a boot install usb stick?
It's due to the install images being iso hybrid images that can be burnt to
an optical disk, or copied to a usb stick.
For example with the netinstall iso ...
$ file Mageia-9-netinstall-nonfree-x86_64.iso Mageia-9-netinstall-nonfree-x86_64.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'Mageia-9-x86_64-netinstall' (bootable)
Regular partitioning software does not handle iso 9660 images, whether in a file on disk, or after having been copied/burnt to a usb stick or optical disk.
When it boots, the mbr partition table entry is used to select the iso9660 image,
or to select the esp which is then used to select the iso9660 image in uefi mode.
Once that starts, the partition table inside of the iso9660 gets used to boot the installer.
I recommend using isodumper. Select the Write image option, the actual iso image to be copied, and the Create partition option, using the dropdown for the type to select Persistent partition. Then select the Execute button.
Regards, Dave Hodgins
--- MBSE BBS v1.0.8.4 (Linux-x86_64)
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