4

I'm trying to make my 32GB flash drive bootable with archlinux. Beginning from release 2010.05, all ISO files can be directly written to USB media. So, what I've did:

dd if=archlinux.iso of=/dev/sdc

Copying has succesfully finished, but I still can't boot from my flash drive.

Are there any additional things, that I should to do? Or, maybe, some flash drive is not able to be bootable? Or what I've missed?

Improve this question
1
  • Pro tip: use cp instead of dd. No fiddling with blocksizes, works well and is less complicated to use, thus involving less errors. Remeber to sync afterwards.
    – bot47
    Commented Jun 22, 2015 at 5:19

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
3

I think you will have to create a FAT32 partition (so, say, /dev/sdc1) that is the same size as the ISO, then use dd to copy to it. Then use parted or some other tool to mark the partition as bootable. If it is the same device, then you would type parted /dev/sdc then type set 1 boot on.

I'm not certain about this, so make sure you use the right device and that you've backed up everything important off it if you haven't already.

EDIT: unetbootin might be able to make the process easier. It specifically says it supports ArchLinux 2010.05.

Improve this answer
3
  • This won't make a difference, dd will overwrite the partition table anyway.
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 24, 2012 at 18:35
  • @Rob Not if you specify a partition rather than the device, i.e. "create a FAT32 partition... then use dd to copy to it [the partition /dev/sdc1]."
    – Doddy
    Commented Jul 25, 2012 at 19:12
  • I'm bad at reading, you're right.
    – Rob
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 4:36
1

Oh, problem was on computer side. And it start to works, when I manually chose my flash drive to boot.

But I don't know why the boot device priority with flash drive on the top hadn't made the same effect.

Improve this answer
0

I want to post my experience.

It took me a while to understand how to create a live-usb with arch linux. The solution is simple. I just wrote:

$ dd if=/adress/of/iso-file of=/adress/of/usb-stick/sda/not/sdaY/don't/write/the/partition/number

I worked a lot with gnome disk utility and gparted. It's okay to clear the partition table of the USB-Stick.

One interesting fact is important. If dd ends with just 100-400 files, then something went wrong. Sometimes it took more time but I abborted because I didn't want to wait so long. Then I did once until it's finished. I'm sure it took about 20 minutes that time and suddely dd shows up with about 10000 files correctly transmitted. I booted the stick and everything works fine. I didn't know about the amount of files and I think if you do it the way I did (as you can see I didn't use the bs=part) and wait about 30 minutes, everything should be fine.

An USB 3.0 stick really can help you.

Improve this answer
2

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .