Linux boot media need not be tricky! In today's episode, I'll talk about four ways to flash an ISO from Windows (and other systems too). I know a lot of you are switching to Linux because of Micros...
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.
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.
No idea if this exists for Linux, but there’s a program for Windows called GuiFormat that allows formatting of larger thumb drives to be fat32.
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.
Dunno how GuiFormat gets around those limitations (something to do with block sizes, I think), but I’ve never had any trouble with it.
There’s better options than fat32, anyway, just pointing out that the 4GB limit has a workaround, and YMMV.