dd, or cat with a shell redirect are all you need to write that iso.
My trouble with dd is all the flags I need to remember to make it fast and more convenient. dd if=file of=/dev/device oflag=direct status=progress bs=1M is there anything I’m missing?
Prevents the writes from piling up in the cache. dd will report the transfer is done when the writes have been cached so this setting prevents dd from exiting until the data has been written completely to the block device.
This ensures the cache is written before dd exits, but doesn’t necessarily write to disk directly. This means that, for small files, dd can finish release its hold on the input file quicker
I don’t burn ISOs often enough to need a dedicated ventoy drive, or to remember how to use the DD command, so Impression is generally what I use. I generally prefer Libadwaita/GTK4 apps that look at home on my system.
No, the drive needs a boot partition for the bios to know there is something to be booted on the drive.
Most Linux ISO’s do properly include the partitions in the ISO, so you can clone the iso to a drive and that should work, using dd for example. But just copying the files won’t work.
iirc windows iso’s did use to support just creating a fat32 partition and moving all the files over, not sure how they managed that. But now the international ISO for win 11 has a file that’s more than the max 4Gb allowed by fat32, so you can’t do that anymore either.
That’s not the only issue, fat32 also has a hard limit on single file size. The largest a single file can be is 4GiB, and afaik you just can’t get around that with fat.
iirc, the way windows deals with this in its media creation tool is that it strips out locales and other things you don’t need, based on the options you selected previously, so the file ends up being small enough to fit.
In the general case, no, but there are some rare specific cases where that does work.
If you’re trying to produce Linux media that will boot on a single-board computer that has an onboard bootloader, like a Pi 4, you can indeed just partition the target medium and copy the files manually (been there, done that, working with a custom Gentoo install with no ISO).
If the bootloader has to be on the target medium (as it would for a desktop or laptop), then that won’t work unless you also do a manual bootloader install after copying everything. Not impossible, but at that point you’re hitting the level of complexity where it’s easier to figure out the correct dd command.
(As for Windows? Don’t even bother. It hates being worked on with anything but its own tools.)
I don’t… understand… the downvotes. I do the same thing though I never really get to the Balena Etcher part. Also, Ventoy is the only way to get a Windows ISO up and running from Linux, as far as I know.
Sadly the “reddit mentality” has already established in this community – theres no “why” in these downvotes other than as a self-relief/validation thing.
Me too! I have used it for a couple other non-rpi devices in the past as well. It is super simple and works on my Mac. I haven’t even looked at other utilities in years.
Also a Raspi Imager fan when I have Pis around since I usually have it installed anyway.
I would use dd, but I always worry I’ll bungle something and only use it when necessary. I’m trying to write a utility called Rubber Duck Disk Dump that takes all the same options but parses your command beforehand to try to guess what you’re doing and warn you if it is really, really stupid, and if you type yes, it then passes all args straight to dd.
I do use Ventoy, but a more “traditional” alternative that I like is Popsicle. Super lightweight, and works very well. Some cases do require a dedicated USB, where Ventoy won’t work, at least not without trickery (e.g. anything with persistent storage).
Yes, mint is good like that. GNOME has a separate Image Writer app/icon, but it has been turned off by default. So it is less discoverable for new people, but more simplified as is the GNOME way
It's also an old and jumbled-up format paralleling .gif in a surprising amount of ways, including being never intended for its primary usage, still being popular, and newer formats proving much better.
Wait why was iso not intended to be used like this? As far as I can see, it was always meant as a digital image of a CD, which is how it was used, and pretty much still is right?
Works for me on Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q's I've sniped used & stacked.
Although I gotta force text mode in Ventoy menu options, otherwise some distro ISO's boot into scrambled graphics, suppose I should bother to RTFM sometime.
I've yet to try Ventoy on an external NVMe case I pieced together recently, and on my wife's newer laptop.
I don’t mean to be rude, but great? Didn’t work for me on all my hardware, even using a Windows ISO. I pointed out my personal experience, because it’s not the panacea its proponents would have everyone believe.
I would certainly never use it to install anything, after my experiences with it. If it can’t get opening ISOs right, I don’t need a surprise that my install is fucked up.
No, it is. How could it be simplier? Install Ventoy and then just drag 'n drop your ISOs to usb drive. Why Rufus is beginner friendly and Ventoy is not?
What are some recommendations for putting Ventoy on your main USB (with other contents instead of just ISOs)? I need to find the guide I saw, it mentioned some configurations to prevent it from searching every directory for ISOs
Also the linked website can be subscribed to from here :)
Alternatively when creating the ventoy installation you can chose to leave X amount of space behind the ventoy partition and then create your own data partition there afterwards. You lose the advantage of “dynamically” sharing the available space between ventoy and your data, but with the seperqte partition you can use whatever filesystem you like for your data, and there is a clear seperation between ventoy and your other data.
I have Ventoy on a USB stick, tried to use it recently for DBAN and it didn’t work, is there any way to get around that these days? Haven’t looked into it recently.
It works for Ultimate Boot CD, which includes DBAN and a lot of other fun stuff.
I play with retro hardware and Ventoy has also worked for me with some weird old isos that even Rufus didn’t work with (XP/Server 2003 multidisc from eXPerience that uses a Linux bootloader?)