Ubuntu
usb-creator package

What are the commands run by usb-creator?

Asked by Ranieri Batista

I have an old computer that is driving me nuts. It does not boot any pendrives, except the ones prepared with Startup Disk Creator (in Ubuntu 10.04.2). I quit trying to find another program that works for this machine.

Instead I'd like to perform manually the same commands Startup Disk Creator uses, in order to create a DOS bootable pendrive.

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Ubuntu usb-creator Edit question
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Ranieri Batista
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

www.bootdisk.com has boot disk images. You should be able to use the same app to transfer the ISO you download (remember to MD5 test)

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Ranieri Batista (ranieribatista) said : 		#2

I have been there before. Which app and which ISO areyou talking about?

I managed to install windows from pendrive, run DOS from it, but on other computers only.
This one is a M861G motherboard, its BIOS must have some bug that screws up the boot process.

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Ranieri Batista (ranieribatista) said : 		#3

I figured it out. Startup Disk Creator created a partition aligned with the geometry reported by the linux kernel, leaving some unpartitioned space at the end. The other tools were using the whole drive. It could be because that is how the pendrive came formaated when I bought it, or that is what Windows does when formatting.

Before finding that I kept trying to repartition the pendrive in fdisk and its reported geometry changed! Tried cfdisk but it refused to work with a FATAL error. I had to use cfdisk -z to find the correct geometry and partition accordingly. Then I installed syslinux and a MBR and succeded to boot syslinux from it. It seems this computer does not use LBA to access USB drives at boot, and it uses a different geometry.

usb-creator mantainers, keep up the good work. Thanks to it I found out how to make bootable pendrives compatible with my aging PC.