On 2026-10-07 18:54, Stefan Monnier wrote:
I noted in an earlier post today, I did get it working on one of my
usb
drives, but it seems sort of a hacky configuration.
Part of the issue is that the ISO images have historically been created
with a lot of care to make them bootable in a wide variety of contexts.
Maybe nowadays things are simpler, but in the past, booting from a
CDROM
or a floppy worked a bit differently than booting from an HDD, and then
things got worse with the introduction of GPT partitions and the UEFI
boot protocol, so you had different ways to boot from an HDD with
different tools handling the different options differently (e.g. some
reading only the GPT, other reading only the MBR partition table,
others reading both with different preferences), so it sometimes
required a lot of care to make sure that your Linux kernel, your boot
loader, and your BIOS all agreed about what is where.
E.g. not sure if current ISOs have both a GPT and an MBR partition
table, but if that's the case, you may have to change both consistently
if you want to add a partition.
=== Stefan
AIUI the recording media is a "block device" (Data recorded in some
fashion). The media that contains the prototype is duplicated as an
image of all the blocks and released. So an image written block by block
by eg. dd is an exact copy of the prototype. I guess once, eg. dd, has
completed it's task it'll quit leaving the rest of the "copied to"
device as was. The prototype and copy would include the first little
vfat (for compatibility) partition with the MBR/EFI GPT data to tell the
PC where to find a kernel.
If it's a netinstall prototype you'd make it read only somehow so it had
more chance of working.
mick
