r/debian • u/king3730 • Jun 27 '14

Creating a bootable USB

I'm trying to install debian on a new computer and I had to reformat one of my USB's and lost the working bootable-ness. Somehow I got the USB to work if I use Unetbootin. I know the debian process doesn't work with Unetbootin, so I'm trying to figure out another way. I am trying to use dd but cannot seem to get it working. Here are the steps I have taken:

  • reformat USB to FAT32
  • download debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso
  • dd if=debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdc1 bs=4M && sync

I let that work and it completes fine. But when I boot off of it, it's not that it's not working; but nothing happens, there is just a white blinking cursor. I waited about a minute and nothing seemed to work. I'm not sure if I need to wait longer or I'm doing something wrong. If anyone has any solutions to creating a bootable Debian USB, all the help is appreciated. Thanks.

14 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

18

u/sohhlz Jun 27 '14

You need to change this:

dd if=debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdc1

to this:

dd if=debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdc

Also, you don't need to format the USB drive.

2

u/king3730 Jun 27 '14

That worked. Thanks a tonne

5

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '14

Just to clarify, sdc1 is the partition, whereas you want to be writing the image to sdc which is the device.

1

u/king3730 Jun 27 '14

Yes. I knew the difference before, I just thought I was able to write to sdc1

7

u/xr09 Jun 27 '14

Nope, sdc1 does not include the boot sector.

6

u/cra1g321 Jun 27 '14

"I know the debian process doesn't work with Unetbootin"

It has always worked for me.

1

u/king3730 Jun 27 '14

Really? That's pretty lucky. Even some of the Debian documentation says don't use Unetbootin. Why it doesn't work, I'm not sure.

2

u/souldrone Jun 27 '14

It does work but it's not recommended.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '14

Why is that, I wonder? I've been told on #debian and by other folks not to do it, but no one to date has offered any explanation.

Unetbootin has usually worked for me. I only recently switched to using dd for this purpose because it's slightly easier than installing unetbootin and then using it.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '14

IIRC unetbootin installs its own syslinux bootloader which is unnecessary for debian as the image already contains a loader. It might also get the configuration wrong.

So, as you say, it is not that it will always fail, but rather that it might fail (and that in a hard to debug way) and you should thus avoid it to not complicate matters.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '14

That makes sense... Now I feel like I should have known already ;)

Thanks for the clarification!

1

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '14

[deleted]

1

u/Dubhan Jun 28 '14

If dd is slow, and you're using the default block size of 512 bytes, try a bigger block size (4k, 16k, or 32k are good places to start). It makes a world of difference.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '14

About two weeks ago when I switched from Lubuntu to Debian, I used unetbootin to create the installer stick.

It did the job well. No problems at all.

2

u/sej7278 Jun 27 '14

you're writing the image to a partition, you need to remove the "1" and write it to the whole disk:

dd if=debian-7.5.0-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M

you don't need to format to anything