On Sat, May 04, 2019 at 11:39:39AM +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:
In Jessie and Stretch, gnome-disk-utility-3.22.1 (which labels itself "Disks") sometimes balks at the instructions I give it. But that is what happens when you use a GUI instead of the command line, and particularly when the utility utilizes ambiguous symbols rather than clear English words. Not everyone assigns the same meaning to a particular symbol. Nonetheless, I do find "Disks" handy to identity the device associated with a USB memory stick just plugged in, and to indicate at a glance the partitioning and formatting. According to "https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb";, all Debian i386 and amd64 images are created using the isohybrid technology, so that they may be copied to USB flash drives which boot directly from the BIOS or EFI firmware of most PCs. In Linux, copy with "cp <file> <device>" or with "dd if=<file> of=<device> bs=4M; sync". And be sure you are copying to the device (such as "/dev/sdd") and not to a partition of the device (such as "/dev/sdd1"). In the case of a USB flash drive which refuses to boot, you might try using "fdisk" to delete all existing partitions and create a new partition, followed by "mkfs.msdos" before you copy the ISO image to the drive. If everything else fails, before you toss the drive into the dumpster, plug the drive into a Window$ box and allow Window$ to format the drive. Now and then a Window$ box can do something useful.
