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Jiskya
Asked: 2012-04-27 17:08:25 +0800 CST

Trouble making a Live USB with Debian 'Sqeeze'

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So first off, I'm using Debian sqeeze and I'm trying to make an Ubuntu 12. 04 Precise Pangolin Live USB. This is kind of a problem at the moment because debian does not have the "startup disk creator" app. So I looked through a number of debian forums and decided to try an app called unetbootin (apparently it's just about the only way I can make a live USB on Squeeze). I downloaded the iso file for 12.04, opened unetbootin and it extracted the files to the USB and everything was perfect. But when I reboot on my USB drive, the first thing on my screen is a unetbootin menu that only allows me to select "default". After I press enter it just loads a command prompt that starts with "(initramfs):" I can't figure out what I did wrong as I am a nub. Any Ideas or alternatives?

debian live-usb 12.04 unetbootin

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can also use dd.

    First, find out what the USB drive is called with sudo fdisk -l, then unmount it, then run

    sudo dd if=/path_to_iso/ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso of=/dev/sdX

    the /dev/sdX part is whatever fdisk had shown, usually /dev/sdb or dev/sdc.

    Example

    Here is the output of sudo fdisk -l showing my USB drive:

    Disk /dev/sdc: 256 MB, 256900608 bytes
60 heads, 27 sectors/track, 309 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1620 * 512 = 829440 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00040358

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1         310      250879    b  W95 FAT32
Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings:
     phys=(31, 59, 27) logical=(309, 43, 18)

    What we need is the device name, which in this case is /dev/sdc. You may have it designated differently,for example /dev/sdb or /dev/sdd (!/dev/sda is usually the hard drive, so don't use it!).

    Lets assume that the ISO I want to write to that USB drive is in the Downloads folder in my home directory.

    sudo dd if=Downloads/ubuntu-12.04-desktop-i386.iso of=/dev/sdc

    The command will write the contents of the ISO image to the USB device.

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  2. Umm, a dd copy is probably the worst idea for booting a livecd from a usb drive. In all seriousness, unetbootin probably just isn't keeping up with the casper scripts update, and forgot a line in the boot list. If you give unetbootin one more chance, but when it's done mount the partition it used, and go into the syslinux folder. Look for a syslinux.cfg, and look for the entry list that starts with LABEL default. On the append line, make sure it has boot=casper and cdrom-detect/try-usb=true. Without those two lines, it will not boot.

    (Ex. APPEND initrd=initrd.img boot=casper cdrom-detect/try-usb=true ro splash --)

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