drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
I like many here do a lot of OS installs. Still mainly burning ISOs to discs (CD or DVD). It's wasteful and pain to organize. Sure PXE would be ideal, some day 
Long been meaning to find out how to put little flash sticks to good use since most modern computers support booting from USB. Where I want to be for a bunch of different reasons.
Being a Debian user (bound to work for others in Linux land) we can use gddrescue to 'burn' that ISO onto a USB stick.
Install gddrescue:
apt-get install gddrescue
Plug the USB stick into a computer. Make sure it doesn't auto-mount (if so unmount it). To determine if mounted do this:
mount
That should display everything mounted. If you find anything related to that USB stick mounted, do this:
umount /mnt/whatever [where /mnt/whatever is the mounted point]
Determine where the USB stick is
fdisk -l
Carefully match up the stick size to relative /dev/id, failure to do so will result in you writing over your precious data on wrong drive
Now navigate to where you have that ISO image. In terminal again:
ddrescue -D --force isoimage.iso /dev/sd[location from above]
ex: ddrescue -D --force isoimage.iso /dev/sdd
You are off to the races, ddrescue should start outputting status updates on the progress:
GNU ddrescue 1.17
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 118358 kB, errsize: 0 B, current rate: 5600 kB/s
ipos: 118358 kB, errors: 0, average rate: 9104 kB/s
opos: 118358 kB, time since last successful read: 1 s
Copying non-tried blocks...
Long been meaning to find out how to put little flash sticks to good use since most modern computers support booting from USB. Where I want to be for a bunch of different reasons.
Being a Debian user (bound to work for others in Linux land) we can use gddrescue to 'burn' that ISO onto a USB stick.
Install gddrescue:
apt-get install gddrescue
Plug the USB stick into a computer. Make sure it doesn't auto-mount (if so unmount it). To determine if mounted do this:
mount
That should display everything mounted. If you find anything related to that USB stick mounted, do this:
umount /mnt/whatever [where /mnt/whatever is the mounted point]
Determine where the USB stick is
fdisk -l
Carefully match up the stick size to relative /dev/id, failure to do so will result in you writing over your precious data on wrong drive
Now navigate to where you have that ISO image. In terminal again:
ddrescue -D --force isoimage.iso /dev/sd[location from above]
ex: ddrescue -D --force isoimage.iso /dev/sdd
You are off to the races, ddrescue should start outputting status updates on the progress:
GNU ddrescue 1.17
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 118358 kB, errsize: 0 B, current rate: 5600 kB/s
ipos: 118358 kB, errors: 0, average rate: 9104 kB/s
opos: 118358 kB, time since last successful read: 1 s
Copying non-tried blocks...
