Re: Partial success and strange partial failure -was [Re: Physically have install DVD set. Want ISO's from which they came.]

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

Hi,

Richard Owlett wrote:
> My starting point is a purchased multi DVD set of Wheezy(7.1.0).
> My goal is a single bootable flash drive with an unstated presumption
> that it would be formatted FAT16 or FAT32. isoinfo reports the flash
> drive is ISO 9660.

Yes, it is. You copied it onto the stick together with a MBR
and its partition table.

What you want is the old method of repacking an ISO to a USB stick.
The documentation is still available as

  https://www.debian.org/releases/oldstable/i386/ch04s03.html.en
  4.3.3. Manually copying files to the USB stick the flexible way

(I myself never tried it. It looks sparse. Probably you want to look
 for older versions or receipes for other Linux distros.)

It might become an own adventure to combine the files of all Debian DVDs,
so that they work like stemming from the BD-R DL image
  http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/7.4.0/i386/jigdo-dlbd/


How about installing a maximum sized Debian system from DVD
onto the USB stick, as if it was a hard disk ?
So that the stick is not an installation medium but rather
a Debian-to-go.


> I would want FAT so I could exchange data with my WinXP machine.

Well, WinXP should be able to mount Joliet enhanced ISO 9660.
But you want write access to the stick, i assume.
ISO 9660 will be mounted read-only on Linux and on Windows.

So you have to format your USB stick to have a large partition
with a FAT32 filesystem.

If your favorite partiton editor refuses to alter the stick
as it is now, then first try to zeroize its first megabyte:

  dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1 of=/dev/sdb

and check, whether the partition editor now perceives it as
unused and editable.
If it complains about something like "Backup GPT", then you
need to zeroize the last MB, too. In worst case, zeroize the
whole stick:

  dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 of=/dev/sdb


Have a nice day :)

Thomas