On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 09:21 +1000, Kyle wrote: > Can someone please point in the direction of an idiot-proof howto to > transfer a .ISO to .IMG or direct to the USB or whatever?
You're asking to be able to surf like a pro without getting wet. There's no one-size-fits-all method to do that. What distro are you trying to put on? IIRC, UNetbootin supports Fedora and openSUSE. How far did you get? Did you get a syslinux boot screen when you tried to boot, or just some "Missing operating system" error? Did you format the drive as FAT32 or ext2? If you formatted it as ext2, you want to use extlinux, not syslinux (a gotcha when I first started hacking on stuff like that). Did your drive have an MBR? It's all very well to set up syslinux and flag the partition as bootable, but you still need the MBR. That was possibly the biggest step that tripped me up when I first started -- and didn't seem to be documented anywhere. The easiest way to do it on my setup is this: # dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdX (Where sdX is your flash drive. It is not sdX1, sdX2 -- just the raw drive. Make sure you have syslinux installed to do that, and before you do that, verify that mbr.bin is less than or equal to 448 bytes, otherwise it will overwrite your flash drive's partition table.) Oh, one other thing. Are you sure the system can actually boot from USB? Have you tried a distro that you know to work (e.g. Ubuntu 8.10 or later with its automatic USB formatter) from USB? Jeremy.
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