I have had a lot of teething problems over the years installing GNU/Linux
from USB, which I've had to do because I was using a PC with no working
optical drive. I've used UNetbootin quite a bit, and sometimes this worked
fine, but other times created various problems, such as:
* the installing trying to load files from an optical drive rather than the
USB
* GRUB being written to the boot USB rather than the target hard drive being
installed to
* not even getting the installer to launch
* other random fails during installation (infrequent)
Folks in these forums have suggested writing .ISO image directly to the USB
using DD, which they assure me works for Trisquel images, but I have no idea
how it goes for other distros.
Recently, I've had some success created boot USBs using the "restore image"
option in the Disks utility in the Control Panel. I simply select my USB
drive in the list, select "restore image", and point it at the .ISO I want to
use for the install. Usually there is a warning that the target drive is
smaller than the image, so I just click 'Start Restoring...', and it seems to
work.
Does anyone know if this is functionally the same as using DD from the
command line, or is it an ugly hack like using UNetBootin, and similarly
liable to create unexpected problems down the line?
