ISOs Explained + four programs to make Linux boot media

- Found the Ventoy bro /s
  
  @AlligatorBlizzard @JustMarkov
  Only FOUR ISO's?
  I forget the number, but I maxed out a 32GB flash drive with an absurd amount of ISO's LOL
  Wowzerz, this new external NVMe I need to format, how many ISO's can I shoehorn onto 1TB, and the boot speeds will probably blow my mind 0/
- What are some recommendations for putting Ventoy on your main USB (with other contents instead of just ISOs)? I need to find the guide I saw, it mentioned some configurations to prevent it from searching every directory for ISOs
  Also while I'm having some federation issues, the linked website can be subscribed to from here :)
  !veronicaexplains@tinkerbetter.tube
- Only 4? Those are rookie numbers
  
  Need a bigger dongle.
- I have Ventoy on a USB stick, tried to use it recently for DBAN and it didn't work, is there any way to get around that these days? Haven't looked into it recently.
  
  It works for Ultimate Boot CD, which includes DBAN and a lot of other fun stuff.
  I play with retro hardware and Ventoy has also worked for me with some weird old isos that even Rufus didn't work with (XP/Server 2003 multidisc from eXPerience that uses a Linux bootloader?)
- wow, really wow.
  i saw veronica talk about ventoy weirdos on mastodon, and here you are.
  
  Also, Ventoy doesn't work on all hardware. Meanwhile, the typical options work just fine.

I like Ventoy because I'm an ISO hoarder but if the task needs a dedicated USB, then I'll open Etcher.
- I don't.... understand.... the downvotes. I do the same thing though I never really get to the Balena Etcher part. Also, Ventoy is the only way to get a Windows ISO up and running from Linux, as far as I know.
  
  The down votes are from the Etcher part, it has a cult of lovers and a cult of haters.
  I'm l fine with people using Etcher, Rufus, or whatever works for them, but I'm aware that both software I just named has passionate haters.
  
  Sadly the "reddit mentality" has already established in this community -- theres no "why" in these downvotes other than as a self-relief/validation thing.

I really don’t get why I should use anything else than dd
- Fear?
- Not everyone likes to use commands for something as trivial as this, its nice to press a couple buttons and wait for it to be done vs learning how dd works and what arguments to use etc.
  
  My favorite way to create a boot media is simply to use cat. No arguments, no shenanigans just a cat into the device :
  cat debian.iso > /dev/sda
  
  Not everyone likes to install compicated graphical software which does a thousand and one things it shouldn't do just to copy files to an external drive
- "What, you guys don't spend money in several external ssds?"
  -- this guy
  
  What? You can use dd to read/write any block storage device (or file)

Great suggestions. The Ventoy bros are weird. Just use what works for you.

dd, or cat with a shell redirect are all you need to write that iso.
My trouble with dd is all the flags I need to remember to make it fast and more convenient. dd if=file of=/dev/device oflag=direct status=progress bs=1M is there anything I'm missing?
- bs=1M
  This part varies based on your hardware (my hardware is much faster with a value of 4096) , but other than that it's everything.
  Here is a handy script that can help determine which bs size is best for your hardware.
  
  Neat! I'll have to try that out.
  
  I think you might mean 4096.
- dd can be soooo much faster too. But like you, I always forget the tags. I should make an alias sometime...
- oflag=direct
  What does this do?
  
  oflag=direct
  Prevents the writes from piling up in the cache. dd will report the transfer is done when the writes have been cached so this setting prevents dd from exiting until the data has been written completely to the block device.
- The video description says it's aimed at Windows users, dd and cat have no power there

dd
- Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

Nice thing about GNOME DE is it comes with Gnome Disks. Select device, click the restore image button and point to the ISO
- I like how simple Mint's USB image writer makes it for newbies, both to look it up in the menu as well as the simple UI
  
  Yes, mint is good like that. GNOME has a separate Image Writer app/icon, but it has been turned off by default. So it is less discoverable for new people, but more simplified as is the GNOME way
- Or you could just install it on any other system with Wayland or x11.
  Gparted works fine for me, so that's what I use.
  
  Gparted is awesome. But probably overwhelming for newbies just looking to burn an iso to USB. Raspberry PI Image Writer works very simply also.

Fedora Media Writer is the best, I hardly use BalenaEtcher but its good too incase the former doesnt work
- Does it work for any distro other than fedora tho?
  
  Yeah I wish it had a different name but it works for every distro via flatpak. I like using it that way but im sure it works well as a package for most distros.

I don't burn ISOs often enough to need a dedicated ventoy drive, or to remember how to use the DD command, so Impression is generally what I use. I generally prefer Libadwaita/GTK4 apps that look at home on my system.
- Does impression support Windows ISOs? Or only ISOHybrid (what Linux ISOs use so you can add them)
  
  I have no idea, I've not had to install windows in a while. From a quick search I see conflicting info...
  A user reported it didn't work, then the dev said he tested it and it works fine

It's also an old and jumbled-up format paralleling .gif in a surprising amount of ways, including being never intended for its primary usage, still being popular, and newer formats proving much better.
- Wait why was iso not intended to be used like this? As far as I can see, it was always meant as a digital image of a CD, which is how it was used, and pretty much still is right?
  
  Oops, yeah, you're right. I was thinking about the live ISO functionality.

I generally use the Raspberry Pi Imager, It works just as well with USB's as TF cards.
GitHub repo
- Me too! I have used it for a couple other non-rpi devices in the past as well. It is super simple and works on my Mac. I haven't even looked at other utilities in years.
- Also a Raspi Imager fan when I have Pis around since I usually have it installed anyway.
  I would use dd, but I always worry I’ll bungle something and only use it when necessary. I’m trying to write a utility called Rubber Duck Disk Dump that takes all the same options but parses your command beforehand to try to guess what you’re doing and warn you if it is really, really stupid, and if you type yes, it then passes all args straight to dd.

I do use Ventoy, but a more "traditional" alternative that I like is Popsicle. Super lightweight, and works very well. Some cases do require a dedicated USB, where Ventoy won't work, at least not without trickery (e.g. anything with persistent storage).

Little known fact, Disk Manager comes with almost every distro, and works just fine.

I've used ventoy to set up a bootable USB with Mint & MX options. It allowed me to set the Mint with persistence. The MX has issues with persistence.
How to set up reusable boot with dd I don't know.
- MX has its own built in tool to make a bootable USB with persistence
  
  Will have to check it out.
  Thanks

Mark Shuttleworth's Startup Disk Creator

I curious because I don't have the skill to test it myself but can you just manually copy everything to USB it's just work?
- No, the drive needs a boot partition for the bios to know there is something to be booted on the drive.
  Most Linux ISO's do properly include the partitions in the ISO, so you can clone the iso to a drive and that should work, using dd for example. But just copying the files won't work.
  iirc windows iso's did use to support just creating a fat32 partition and moving all the files over, not sure how they managed that. But now the international ISO for win 11 has a file that's more than the max 4Gb allowed by fat32, so you can't do that anymore either.
  
  No idea if this exists for Linux, but there's a program for Windows called GuiFormat that allows formatting of larger thumb drives to be fat32.
- In the general case, no, but there are some rare specific cases where that does work.
  If you're trying to produce Linux media that will boot on a single-board computer that has an onboard bootloader, like a Pi 4, you can indeed just partition the target medium and copy the files manually (been there, done that, working with a custom Gentoo install with no ISO).
  If the bootloader has to be on the target medium (as it would for a desktop or laptop), then that won't work unless you also do a manual bootloader install after copying everything. Not impossible, but at that point you're hitting the level of complexity where it's easier to figure out the correct dd command.
  (As for Windows? Don't even bother. It hates being worked on with anything but its own tools.)

Another program that works on Windows, which I prefer to Balena Etcher, but less so than Rufus: unetbootin