Re: Problem creating iso for a USB stick

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Thomas Schmitt <scdbackup@gmx.net> wrote:

Hi,

Hi, please see below.

i am the developer of xorriso and always interested
in learning about problems.

> However, after writing it to a USB stick, it doesn't boot,
> and I don't know why.

What kind of machine do you use ?

It is a regular PC with a Intel i7 processor.

What kind of firmware does it have: PC-BIOS , UEFI, ... ?

PC bios.

How far does it get with booting ?

Not very far. The machine starts and the USB stick flashes briefly. Then the initial screen (with details about the BIOS, hard drives, memory, etc.) is displayed then a black screen with a blinking cursor and that's it.

Does the USB stick make any difference when plugged in
or is it just ignored ?

No it doesn't make any difference. With or without it, the behavior is the same (see above).

How did you put the result onto USB stick ?

I tried three different methods:

1. I've done it in MacOSX with the method described here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-mac-osx

2. I've done it in Linux (Debian, the same machine I used to create it) by dd'ing the contents of the iso to the USB stick.

3. Again, in Linux (same machine) by copying the iso directly to /dev/sdm and then doing sync.

> I've checked the resulting iso with vmware fusion on my mac and it works,

Did you submit it as emulated hard disk (rather than as CD-ROM) ?
BIOS treats both device classes very different. (MBR vs. El Torito.)
An USB stick would be treated by real BIOS as hard disk.

Umm ... don't know for sure, when you create a new virtual machine, it asks for a image. And there I selected it. It seems to me it is a CD-ROM. I should note that, before finding out about xorriso, I tried to create the iso using genisoimage and that one worked as well with vmware in exactly the same way. Which leads me to believe that it is seeing it as a CD-ROM.

> xorriso -as mkisofs -D -r -J -joliet-long -L -A "Custom Install CD"
> -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.cat -iso-level 3 -no-emul-boot
> -partition_offset 16 -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o ../test.iso
> -isohybrid-mbr /usr/lib/syslinux/isohdpfx.bin ../cd

This looks ok as far as PC-BIOS booting from USB stick is
concerned. It should work on i386 and amd64 processors.

You may leave out -partition_offset 16 and check whether this
changes anything with bootability. Some machines demand it, some
hate it. Most work with both variants.

(If you want to see "Custom Install CD" as name of the filesystem
then you should use -V rather than -A.)

As I said in my previous mail in the thread, I've tried to use the "official" xorriso command that the Debian devs used to generate the netinst image. However, it fails because of -isohybrid-gpt-basdat (I guess because xorriso in Wheezy is 1.2.2 and this option was added later).

Would it be possible for you to make a deb for Wheezy with the latest version of xorriso or do I have to compile it by hand?

Have a nice day :)

You too and thanks a lot for your help, it is greatly appreciated!

Thomas