On Fri, 11 Mar 2022 09:01:36 +0000, Theo wrote:
[removing comp.sys.raspberry-pi, since it's offtopic there]
In uk.comp.os.linux Martin Gregorie <martin@mydomain.invalid> wrote:
The mediawriter program, which I'd just downloaded, claims to be able
to write a bootable image to any USB-connected device, so I stuck a 4GB
SD card in a USB-connected SD reader and mediawriter reported no
problems when writing the ISO image to the SD card on my Lenovo T440,
but the r61i only blinks the LED on the SD reader tries to boot off the
buggered image on the SSD.
Since mediawriter has no help display (--help does nothing) or manpage
I'm temporarily out of ideas, so any suggestions will be gratefully
received.
USB and DVD booting are different. USB drives look like hard drives (partition tables, etc), while DVDs include a virtual floppy drive image that's used to start the boot process. Most Linux distros/Windows etc
have come up with a way that a single ISO image can look like both a DVD
with its virtual floppy image, and also a valid hard drive partition
format. Once you're into grub then everything is the same from there
on.
I don't know mediawriter, but some tools like unetbootin try to
construct this chimera of a disc from a raw DVD image. Mediawriter's
claims of bootable images makes me concerned it tries to do similar.
These days you don't want that, because the ISO already has everything
set up just so.
So I would try something like Etcher to write the ISO to SD card,
because that's not going to mess with the contents - just make sure the
bits are copied correctly.
The second question is: does the Lenovo support booting off SD card?
Often boot from an integral SD reader isn't supported, and trying to
boot from SD in USB readers is often flaky (some readers work, others
don't). I would try a real USB stick - they have more of a chance of working, although you may have to try a few. Sometimes cheap
cereal-packet USB sticks work when name-brands don't, or vice versa.
That's a good point: I've not, as far as I can remember, tried booting
off an SD card, just from CDs back in the day when new Fedora versions
had to be burnt to a CD - ie before Fedora 20 - its now version 35.
I also wonder if it matters that my SSD contains a formerly bootable
image that now gets far enough into a normal boot to start connecting partitions containg larts of the filestore before dropping into emergency
mode. Could this be preempting any attempt to boot from the USB device,
which does get noticed and then ignored?
But, thanks for the rest of your info - that fills in a few cracks in my knowledge and gives me some other ideas to try. If they don't work, I'll
just buy a DVD writer since they turn out to be cheaper than I thought
they would be.
FYI mediawriter is quite likely just a script of some sort, since it can combine the two operations of downloading & validating an ISO from RedHat before writing it to whatever suitable, and big enough, USB-connected
storage device it finds. Not realising the size of the ISO, I'd first
tried to write it to a blank CD with an LG USB writer that I'd previously
used to burn CD ISOs. It silently refused.
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