On Tuesday, January 03, 2012 11:14:42 AM Viesturs Lācis did opine: > 2012/1/3 gene heskett <ghesk...@wdtv.com>: > > On Tuesday, January 03, 2012 06:00:47 AM Viesturs Lؤپcis did opine: > >> 2012/1/3 gene heskett <ghesk...@wdtv.com>: > >> > I do not currently have a machine that can boot from either usb or > >> > network, and that includes this $300 Asus mobo with a quad core > >> > phenom on it. آ So ATM, the only universal boot to install method I > >> > have is to maintain a working internal optical drive in every box. > >> > >> I am sure that there is even more universal method, which fits also > >> size-limited situations - You can have one dvd drive for all machines > >> and attach it to particular PC, when necessary. That way You will > >> save on dvd drive cost, space in the case (and case size, if space > >> limit is an issue) and, important for DIY cases, also effort of > >> fitting it nicely in the case. > > > > I have a couple of those 8Gb usbkeys, one of which I wrote an .iso to > > with dd, which theoretically should work. آ I could mount the image > > and read it, but none of my machines have a new enough bios that they > > could boot from it. > > I have no idea, what is dd. I think that using System -> > Administration -> Startup disk creator is safer choice.
Might be. dd is the exact copier of the whole device. An .iso is supposed to be the byte for byte image of the device. dd has no knowledge of burn power so it can only read an optical device. I can write an install iso to one of those 8Gb keys using dd, then mount it and access it, for read only if I want and other than the key's read response being a little faster initially, there is little if any other detectable difference when reading. I would say read/write, but when a device is mounted using the iso9660 file system, that file system, originally made for data cd's, doesn't have (I assume since that is normally read only media) a write capability. That is why we use a system that writes the whole disk at once, or at best can append to the image that is there when in multisession mode, a horrible kludge that usually destroys the ability to read the first session. This is an un-avoidable artifact of the fact that optical media doesn't have tracks or cylinders in its makeup, but is just one long track, identified by a sector header inserted between every 2048 bytes of data in one long spiral track. One LSN identifier, so when you ask to read a certain file, it first scans the inside of the disk to find the LSN of the desired file, then skips the head across the disc until it reads one of those headers and figures out if it has to skip outward or inward using a successive approximation until it is a few turns in front of that LSN, starts tracking & gives you the file when it arrives. That is why seek times are so slow for optical media. No doubt the startup disk creator could do it too. But dd and its ilk have been around for most of the life of Unix. An old, familiar tool that to do it on windows requires Nortons Ghost, also requires the correct options set. I rather like the *nix attitude that a utility should do one thing, and do that one thing the best way it can be done. dd is a do one thing well utility. This "pclos" install does not have that 'disk creator' in its menu's, but does have K3b, the swiss army knife of such utilities for optical media. That K3b is of course just a pretty gui face for all the command line based utilities that actually do the ditch digging, exactly as I expect your disk creator actually is down where the rubber meets the dirt. Usually, its growisofs that does the deed. :) > In Lucid it is > installed by default. At least I love that tool. > It will ask for a destination USB drive and source .iso file and > wholaa! It will do all the small things, like creating the boot sector > etc. > I like that I still can use such a USB drive for storage - I simply > copy my files right next to the things that already are there, because > the Ubuntu install will use ~1GB. > > Viesturs Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Write once. Port to many. Get the SDK and tools to simplify cross-platform app development. Create new or port existing apps to sell to consumers worldwide. Explore the Intel AppUpSM program developer opportunity. appdeveloper.intel.com/join http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-appdev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
