Isohybrid

[viking60]

Sometimes we need to transfer our downloaded iso's to USB dongles. Laptops today frequently do not have DVD drives so we need to boot "LiveCD's" from USB.

To manage this; the iso image needs to be a hybrid.

Our viking.iso is such a hybrid which means that we can use dd to "burn" it to a dongle.

To check if an image file is a hybrid you can do a:

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fdisk -l viking.iso

If the resulting lines contain the iso name - in this case viking.iso - then it is a hybrid!
If the iso is not a hybrid you can use isohybrid to turn any iso image into a hybrid.

So the next thing is to bring it on to our USB dongle then:

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sudo dd if=viking.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=4k

if means in-file of is out-file and bs=4 is not necessary but it speeds up the process considerably. /dev/sdb is the address of the usb dongle which you can find with a simple

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fdisk -l

You can also use

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lsblk

or

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ls /dev/sd*

Make sure you unmount the usb before you "burn" your image to it:

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umount /dev/sdb

Once this is done you can dd your iso to the usb dongle. Make sure you have the right location because dd will format your USB.

There are tools to help you with this like Rufus and Unetbootin

[dedanna1029]

Curious, how necessary is bs=4k in the DD command?
I have always done it without it.

[viking60]

It is not necessary it just speeds up things.