[conspire] Live Distro on USB

[Paul Zander]

I previously posted an item about some USB drives not working with live iso files.  Upon further investigation, I have concluded that the problem is not the USB drive, but certain iso files. 

In particular, the first live distro happened to linux-mint, which just worked.   Various Debian files don't, even with the same hardware.

Reference: 
How do I write a CD/DVD/BD image to a USB flash drive?
https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb

Under certain conditions, which are detailed below, the USB drive would get into a state that Linux would not recognize it.   So I cobbled together the following procedure using a computer running Win 8.1 and another running Wheezy.   In the end, I want both computers to run a more recent distro, but I totally underestimated the  difficulties in using live images to evolute different distro. 

FORMAT USB DRIVE ON WINDOWS PC, THEN EJECT. 

CHECK DEVICES WITHOUT USB DRIVE
$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 

INSERT USB DRIVE 
$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 128 Feb 21 11:59 /dev/sdi 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 129 Feb 21 11:59 /dev/sdi1 
USB DRIVE IS /dev/sdi

$: mount | grep sdi 
/dev/sdi1 on /media/paulz/BC53-F947 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0022,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=utf8,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2) 

COPY ISO FILE: 
$: sudo dd if=linuxmint-17.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso bs=4M  of=/dev/sdi ; sync 
369+1 records in 
369+1 records out 
1549615104 bytes (1.5 GB) copied, 71.0849 s, 21.8 MB/s 

$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 128 Feb 21 12:01 /dev/sdi 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 129 Feb 21 11:59 /dev/sdi1 

REMOVE USB DRIVE 
$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 

REINSERT USB DRIVE 
PACMAN FILE MANAGER OPENS DIALOG BOX ASKING TO MOUNT THE FILE 
$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 128 Feb 21 13:14 /dev/sdi 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 129 Feb 21 13:14 /dev/sdi1 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 130 Feb 21 13:14 /dev/sdi2 

$: mount | grep sdi 
/dev/sdi1 on /media/paulz/Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 64-bit type iso9660 (ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,mode=0400,dmode=0500,uhelper=udisks2) 


PUT USB DRIVE INTO WINDOWS PC 
WINDOWS FILE EXPLORER SHOW FOLDER NAMED efi and under it a folder named boot. 

NOW REPEAT BUT WITH A debian iso FILE.

$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 128 Feb 22 20:04 /dev/sdi 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 129 Feb 22 20:04 /dev/sdi1 

$: sudo dd if=debian-live-8.3.0-amd64-lxde-desktop.iso of=/dev/sdi ; sync 
[sudo] password for paulz: 
1961984+0 records in 
1961984+0 records out 
1004535808 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 371.283 s, 2.7 MB/s 


DEVICE IS STILL THERE AFTER dd 
$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 128 Feb 22 20:12 /dev/sdi 
brw-rw---- 1 root disk   8, 129 Feb 22 20:04 /dev/sdi1 

REMOVE DRIVE, WAIT, RE-INSERT.  NOT RECOGNIZED 

$: ls -l /dev/sd[h-l]* 

PUT USB DRIVE IN WINDOWS MACHINE. 
Pop-up says , “You need to format the disk ...” 


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