Re: Bootable USB won't working

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Akhil Krishnan S wrote:
> dd if=debian.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4M && sync

So it is about the ISOs.
(But "debian.iso" is not a known ISO name. We got "mini.iso" as best
 attempt to obscure content and intended audience.)


> ISO of squeeze, and beta versions of wheezy.

Those are the ones which work ?
(I assume because both are quite outdated.)

There is is still a lot of variation possible.
What exact version (7.0, 7.1, ...) and what CPU architecture (i386, amd64) ?

Best would be the full names of working and non-working ISO.

The exact Dell model number might give some clue, too.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron
describes a wide range of possible CPUs.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Some blind guessing:

The most obvious difference between USB stick bootability of
  debian-7.3.0-i386-netinst.iso
and
  debian-8.2.0-i386-netinst.iso
is that the latter has EFI boot equipment, while the former only
boots via BIOS or EFI BIOS emulation.

One may remove the MBR partition of type 0xef and the GPT header
block by these two dd runs:

  dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 seek=462 count=16 conv=notrunc \
     of=debian-8.2.0-i386-netinst.iso

  dd if=/dev/zero bs=1 seek=512 count=512 conv=notrunc \
     of=debian-8.2.0-i386-netinst.iso

This can be done directly on the USB stick with the ISO on it
by using of=/dev/sdb instead of the ISO file path.

Afterwards the EFI entry points are gone but the stick still
boots via qemu-system-i386 -hda.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Own question to the public:

I tried to run on Debian 8 
  qemu-system-i386 -bios /usr/share/ovmf/OVMF.fd
but that does not boot debian-8.2.0-i386-netinst.iso from -hda.

What firmware file to use with qemu-system-i386 in order to demonstrate
EFI booting on i386 ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas