To whom it may concern in the Debian team, I have a question about creating ISOs. I am currently attempting to create an ISO file from an existing Debian 11 installation. I want to do this in order to more easily share this customized copy with a few friends. However, I have not found a tool that allows me to properly create an ISO specifically with the ext4 filesystem. My question is this: what tools does your team use to create your ISO distributions? Also, how would I go about creating an ISO or tar.gz that contains a preinstalled version of Debian and allows me to extract it to a USB drive in a bootable state? I don’t know if my understanding of ISOs is correct, but know this must be possible.
I have tried using tar to zip the drive’s contents, but after extracting them to the target USB drive, I get an “operating system not found” error, even though the files appear the same. Maybe some symbolic links or hidden files didn’t make it through? I tried partclone.ext4 but the iso file was not usable and it did not create a usable partition when I tried to write it to a drive. Similarly, clonezilla’s “recover-iso-zip” option only creates another clonezilla installation and not an ISO containing the original files themselves. I have tried dd many times, however this will only create a massive ISO with the same size as the drive, even when using the sparse flag on this command or when piping it through to a cp command with sparse=always. I have also tried mkisofs/genisoimage but these also create ISOs that do not write in a usable manner to the USB disk. e2image makes massive images, even when piped to a sparse cp command. Various other utilities like gnome disks will also create massive ISOs. Tools like Brasero and K3B and a couple others cannot accept hidden files when creating an ISO, Cubic is for ubuntu, and I don’t know how to use Linux Live Kit since there are very few guides on how to use it properly or how to handle errors when they appear. Please let me know how you think I should approach this problem of creating an ISO from an existing installed system and writing it to a disk. Any ISO expertise would be greatly appreciated! I thought it would be a good idea to directly ask those involved with ISO creation on the Debian team! Thanks, Ricardo Romanach
