Bootable USB Flash Drive Creation

Bootable USB Flash Drive Creation

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Contents

Drive-removable-media-usb-pendrive.pngBootable USB Flash Drive Creation
For netbooks it will probably be necessary to have an USB flash drive as bootable medium (because of the lack of a CD/DVD device).

Preparation

In order to put a Chakra image into an USB flash drive, you will obviously need one with at least 1 Gb, and a machine with USB ports and software that will be suggested here, since it's not as generic as the one used for CD or DVD.

Also, you should make sure the system where you will boot the USB flash drive has also USB ports and can boot USB flash drives (old BIOS's normally can't, but most current do).

Before following any steps, make sure the device is plugged but not mounted.

Now, where will you create your bootable USB flash drive?

256px-Heckert GNU white.png Win-like-userbox.png
GNU (Linux, BSD or Hurd) Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

SUSE Studio ImageWriter

For Windows, you need to download SUSE Studio ImageWriter. Note: If you are running Windows XP or earlier, make sure you have at least .NET 2.0 installed.

Open the SUSE Studio ImageWriter and press the Select button. In the file name box type '*' (without the quotes) and find the Chakra LiveCD image. Select your USB stick and click the Write button

With win32diskimager GUI

Download the software from here Unpack and run.

You need to rename your chakra.iso to chakra.img first as the application only allows .img files.

Just pick the drive letter you wish to write on and pick your renamed .img file and press the Write button.

Linux Live USB Creator

Note: This method is actually officially supported by Linux Live. However, it was reported as broken for Edn, and has not yet been tested with Archimedes. Please use with great care and report successes, people have gotten flawed install media in the past.

Based on this forum post

Linux Live is the easiest way to get Chakra on a USB drive. Download it from here, and remember to run it as administrator through the right-click menu.

Liveusb1.png
  1. Your USB stick needs to be freshly formatted to Fat32. If it was not, tick the "Format USB stick" checkbox (it will erase all data on that stick, back it up first). Then, select your usb stick from the menu.
  2. Move onto Step Two in the program and select the ISO/IMG option and navigate to the relevant Chakra ISO file. It will then perform a integrity test to see if it's compatible which Chakra. This will fail in case you are using x86_64 edition, but don't worry about that, it'll work.
  3. Move to Step Four in the program, untick "Hide the files" and "Enabling launching LinuxLive in Windows" checkboxes as these aren't needed.
  4. Providing there were no errors, you will now be told everything is ready and good to go.

You can restart your system to use the usb stick now.

From Windows command line

You need to download dd which is a common program with the primary purpose of low-level copying of raw data.

Once installed, open the command prompt and do this: 

dd.exe if=/path/to/the/downloaded/iso of=/path/to/the/USB/device

GNU Distributions

SUSE Studio ImageWriter (GUI)

It is best to use the application Imagewriter, available in the Chakra apps-repo. Install the app:

sudo pacman -S imagewriter

Now

  • Drag the downloaded ISO into imagewriter, or browse to the directory containing the ISO,
  • Connect your USB stick,
  • Check the shown path is correct, and
  • Click the Write button.

Using the command line

In order to create a bootable USB flash drive, you will need coreutils (which provides dd). Most GNU distributions (including Chakra) have coreutils already installed.

To use dd, run this in a terminal: 

sudo dd if=/path/to/the/downloaded/iso of=/path/to/the/USB/device

or, if you want to get the progress of the command you can install pv and run: 

pv -tpreb /path/to/the/downloaded/iso | sudo dd of=/path/to/the/USB/device

Where /path/to/the/USB/device would be the USB flash drive under /dev. It will probably be /dev/sd-, where - will be a letter. Remember that it should be unmounted, so there should be no sd-1 entries.

Then you can check that the creation of the bootable USB stick was successful. Use fdisk -l as root to check it. You should see an asterisk (*) like this in your USB line: 

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         697      713728   17  Hidden HPFS/NTFS
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