On Friday, September 24, 2021 4:38:38 PM CDT Bob Bernstein wrote: > Is there a favored HOW-To or wiki page describing the care and > feeding of USB sticks intended to boot a linux system into some > other OS? > > Thanks,
I haven't seen an official HOWTO. There are vastly different methods of formatting a bootable USB for different operating systems, especially Windows, that can change with each release. Windows 10 in particular, is an annoyance. The archive files on the ISOs are often larger than 4GB, which is larger than what standard USB exFat filesystem can handle. They have to be split using the Windows DISM utility, or placed on an NTFS formatted drive. The problem is that not every UEFI BIOS can boot from NTFS. A lot depends entirely on the state of the OS in question, and on what your computer's firmware can recognise, so writing a definitive Debian document would be extremely time consuming to maintain. I do not speak for the Debian Project, but I have always felt that dealing with Windows or other OS minutae is outside of the Project's purvue. I do sympathise with your needs, but Debian has limited resources, and if users want to host multiple OSs, then they should do the appropriate reasearch for themselves. Otherwise, I think it is quite possible it would open a flood of support issues, and Debian would end up expending more and more resources to resolve problems and maintain documentation for other OSs. T.J.
