Re: bootable pendrive from zip file

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

Hi,

Max Nikulin wrote:
> Out of curiosity, does the requirement of specific GUID exist for removable
> drives?

It is disputed, whether the specs say that the partitions must be marked
by 0xEF in legacy MBR tables and by C12A7328-F81F-11D2-BA4B-00A0C93EC93B
in GPT.
In practice there seems to be no such demand. A zillion Microsoft users
would complain if the specs were interpreted narrowly.


> A USB drive may be formatted without partition table.

The specs only talk of partitions. Whether the real implementations would
look into the FAT filesystem of an unpartitioned device would have to be
tested.

(Boot firmware is a bitch. The hunchbacked partition layout of Debian ISOs
is still the one which boots on most machines. Other distros decided to
clean up at the cost of losing some old laptops.)


> 7z and bsdtar can extract content of ISO files without mounting images.

But mounting needs no special software and gives you the opportunity
to use many different ways of copying, which may be decisive when the
target is a heavily restricted filesystem like FAT.

(I still wonder which software in the Debian ISO needs the symbolic link
"/debian -> ." and which parts of the file tree are accessed via this
link. Probably one can avoid to duplicate the whole tree under /debian.)


Have a nice day :)

Thomas