Re: USB sticks & Debian
On Friday, September 24, 2021 4:38:38 PM CDT Bob Bernstein wrote:
> Is there a favored HOW-To or wiki page describing the care and
> feeding of USB sticks intended to boot a linux system into some
> other OS?
>
> Thanks,
I haven't seen an official HOWTO.
There are vastly different methods of formatting a bootable USB for different
operating systems, especially Windows, that can change with each release.
Windows 10 in particular, is an annoyance. The archive files on the ISOs are
often larger than 4GB, which is larger than what standard USB exFat filesystem
can handle. They have to be split using the Windows DISM utility, or placed
on an NTFS formatted drive. The problem is that not every UEFI BIOS can boot
from NTFS.
A lot depends entirely on the state of the OS in question, and on what your
computer's firmware can recognise, so writing a definitive Debian document would
be extremely time consuming to maintain.
I do not speak for the Debian Project, but I have always felt that dealing
with Windows or other OS minutae is outside of the Project's purvue.
I do sympathise with your needs, but Debian has limited resources, and if
users want to host multiple OSs, then they should do the appropriate reasearch
for themselves.
Otherwise, I think it is quite possible it would open a flood of support
issues, and Debian would end up expending more and more resources to resolve
problems and maintain documentation for other OSs.
T.J.
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