Hi, > what's the difference between usb-hybrid iso's and usb-hdd .img's
The ISO hybrids contain in their first 32 kB a Master Boot Record for BIOS booting from hard-disk-like devices, and maybe a GUID Partition Table for EFI booting from hard-disk-like devices. They may even contain an Apple Partition Map which leads the booting system to a HFS or HFS+ filesystem tree. Booting fom CD, DVD, or BD starts not at an MBR or GPT but at an El Torito boot record. This is present by default in a bootable ISO image. Booting from ISO images is highly technical stuff. I myself understand only the earliest steps, for which i have to prepare the output of xorriso. All further steps are the job of the bootloader program that sits in the ISO image. What i learned so far is collected in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~libburnia-team/libisofs/scdbackup/view/head:/doc/boot_sectors.txt > cat debian.iso > /dev/sdX > The question is, is there a way to get verbose output ? > Is there a way to get some sort of progress bar [...] ? You could install some entertaining filter between the cat process and the device. Like cat debian.iso | $(scdbackup -where bin)/raedchen -step 1M >/dev/sdX which would report progress in megabyte steps. ("raedchen" stems from my backup tool scdbackup. Such a filter is not hard to program. Just read data from stdin, count them, put them out on stdout, and print some entertaining message to stderr, when enough bytes have been counted.) Maybe there is a GUI file management tool which can copy a data stream to /dev/sdX. It has to be able to write data to a file without objecting that it already exists and without removing and re-creating it. > Also do I have to unmount the device before doing the above. Oh yes. You really should umount. Especially if the target device is mounted with write permission. In that case, some inadverted write operation of the file system driver could alter your ISO image and cause interesting effects when it shall be used for booting or software installation. Have a nice day :) Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
