Hi, Mike Castle wrote: > > I believe this whole class of problems is why tools like Rufus > > (https://rufus.ie/) were developed.
[email protected] wrote: > Wait a moment, and to clear any misunderstanding: I'm talking > about the content of the installation media being shredded > while being used. I can't imagine what a difference it could > ever make whether you wrote that media with dd, bit-bang or > whatever other method? I think "shredding" is too hard. I'd call it "splashing about". About the difference: Pete Batard, the author of Rufus, writes in https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Why_doesnt_Rufus_recommend_DD_mode_over_ISO_mode_for_ISOHybrid_images_Surely_DD_is_better "Another nail in the coffin of "DD is better", is that you cannot add runtime content validation, which is something that Rufus can add to any UEFI based media (through UEFI MD5SUm) to enable boot-time check that your media has not been corrupted, which, given the unreliable nature of flash based USB drives, is arguably much better than a once-off write-time check. Writing an ISOHybrid in DD mode can never give you that. " So Rufus has its own means to deal with filesystem gropers, although i doubt the something called "MD5SUm" would be considered a security measure on our side of the fence. (MD5 would be ok to verify copy success, but not for checking against malice in ISO or on USB stick.) In general i think that a writable FAT filesystem with all the files from the ISO image is even a bigger invitation for arbitrary software to make its own little adjustments to the USB stick content. > I think I'll not click on a github link this time, thanks. I already knew it and always found it too excited for a topic which leaves a lot of room for discussion and but-what-if arguments. Pete Batard is as proud of his work as we Linux isohybriders are of ours. But his text lets him appear deeply annoyed by the expectations of GNU/Linux developers and users. (I cannot judge what a user of MS-Windows expects as natural. To my meager experience they mostly expect sudden disaster.) Some of the technical arguments against "dd" are valid. That's why i made a shell script which shall keep the non-Windows users from overwriting their hard disk by mistake and also cares for the perils of previously GPT partitioned USB sticks. https://packages.debian.org/unstable/xorriso-dd-target https://wiki.debian.org/XorrisoDdTarget Have a nice day :) Thomas
