What am I doing Wrong?

Alright guys, new laptop is in and I think I'm a bit rustier than I thought!

I downloaded linux mint(just to start)

Formatted my thumbdrive to fat32

Copied the mint .ISO to the thumbdrive

Restarted and pointed my computer to boot from the thumbdrive

And yet it still just goes straight to Windoze

What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks

 

You need to extract the iso to the flash drive and make it bootable. I would suggest you use a utility called UNeetbootin, that will make you a bootable flash-drive, which you can boot from.

 

Great program, thanks emiljan!

I figured it could just read the .ISO right from the USB, but I was wrong.

Thought I had done it differently on an older Asus MOBO

Thanks Again!

 

Hmm, used the program emiljan posted above and yet my computer will still not recognize, just goes right into normal boot sequence.

Anyone know what key will launch you into boot selection mode in the boot sequence? I've hit "del" and gotten to the bios and selected from there, but no dice.

Thanks

 

Seems unetbootin can't always get the drive partitioned just right, I use the startup disk creator's format option, exit it, then use unetbootin to make the thumb drive and it works great.

 

From my own experience, unetbootin can be a mixed bag. Just burn the .iso to a DVD or CD.

 

Debian images can be written to USB sticks in raw format. I have no idea if that also goes for Mint.

 

You could try this one HERE as I have used it twice and have had no problem and there are step by step instructions. Just download the ISO you want to your folder and then use the USB creator to find it and install it on USB.
Good luck.

****EDIT*****-You might want to check first if Linux Mint will run on a LIVE USB, I don't know if it does.

 

I'll try Evil Claw's method, as the Mint Installer is about 5 mb too big for a standard CD-R. And I don't have any DVD-r's in stock currently.

I don't remember this being this difficult..

 

Bah, the program you suggested, Evil Claw, is absolutely awesome!

However! Upon selecting my USB drive on the boot up menu..it still just goes right into Windoze

Ugh

 

Try checking out dd for windows.

dd works like this:

dd if=(name of iso) of=(USB drive)

 

**UPDATE**

Okay so I don't know what the deal was exactly, but I loaded up openSUSE no problem.

However, it is looking for a username/password(even on a liveinstall) prior to actually installing the OS..funky?

Working on MINT again now.

 

If you actually got opensuse to work, Linux has dd built in.

Try:

dd if=(/dev/sdX/linktodirectorywhereisiso) of=(/dev/sdX where usb drive is located)

dd takes and "burns" the iso image to any drive you specify as if it were burning a cd. Most useful indeed! I have used it many times without issue.

 

Are you sure ? ISO is quite a format which AFAIK is not compatible with USB booting method. Usually USB is treated as a HDD or FLOPPY or ZIP which relies on the boot sector. ISO CD/DVD is completely different.

usually unetbootin would install proper things on the usb(syslinux) and chain boot into the iso image but it is the first time I heard that you can dump an iso image directly onto usb and it becomes magically bootable.

 

dd works the same as if you were writing to a cd or a floppy or other media.

Here is the man page that shows some more dd options.

 

dd is just a block dump. It is the source block that matters. If the source block is properly prepared (i.e. in debian's case an image with syslinux on it intended for USB or probably HDD as well if the boot loader is syslinux), of course you can dd it to a USB block device.

We are talking about an ISO image which is intended to be burnt to a CD/DVD.

EDIT:
try to put in differently, the BIOS booting mechanism on CD/DVD is different from booting floppy/HDD.

 

Ok, it is not a source dump. It extracts the actual content of the .iso .img .whatever and replicates it as it was compressed,

So if you have a bootable image, you can dd that image and the original content/boot parameters are replicated.

EDIT: Here is intel giving an example of doing the same thing.

 

I am lost again on your first paragraph.

That intel page only mention .img. But what is the format of this .img is unknown. If it is a floppy image and your BIOS support USB-floppy boot, it works. If it is ISO, I am 99% sure dd would not work.

 

.img and .iso are one in the same.

dd does not see the 2 types of images any different. If you compressed a file as XXX.foo with boot parameters, it would work exactly the same.

 

ok.

try to download a W7 iso image(or any of those image that said .iso) and use dd to put it onto a usb stick and see if you can boot into the W7 installation screen(or whatever iso you download).

If it is that simple, why would there be a thing called isolinux ?

 

I'm not getting into this again with you.

It does work! Use google and look into it! Try it if you want, I don't really care if you believe me or not.

Geeze!

 

Noop. IT DOESN'T WORK. You are giving wrong or confusion information and I have to correct/clarify that, for the benefit of other readers.

 

Ok, thats fine.

Arch must be wrong to

Must be wrong

As I said before, I don't have the time to do your research!

 

It depends on the ISO file.

Not all are hybrid images.

 

Most are going the way of making them USB bootable.

I believe at least all the major ditros have.

 

Curious to know where I can find these ISO that can dd onto a USB and boot. As I said, that is the first time I heard about it.

 

The newest mint is one, just looked it up.

After looking into it, it seems like all major do indeed have it. Debian derivatives have been a little slow because it broke something. But the beta Ubuntu has it as well as Mint.

And it can be done with Windows 7. (at least in theory)

 

stand corrected. Haven't been in the linux scene for a few years(at least installation wise).

#551951 - debian-cd: Please make .iso files usable as USB images, via isohybrid - Debian Bug report logs

 

Bah, well I got the USB to load both MINT and openSUSE, however, suse is requiring a password and MINT is just freezing up..

Suck!

 

You know I ran into this problem on my MX6920 and couldn't for the life of me get it to run/boot from the USB. I finally installed Ubunut 11.01 as dual boot. I am wondering if it is because the bios needed to be updated in order to install/run win7 rather than the XP it originally came with. That could be the reason but don't know as I had re-installed win xp up to SP2 and just decided to install Ubuntu 11.04 as dual boot and keep from pulling out the rest of my hair. I haven't done anything else with win xp on that one.
My netbook is running win 7 starter (piece of crap) and I 'm running live USB Kubuntu 11.04 on that with no problem.
How old is the computer your wanting to run Live USB on? I was thinking that there might be some problem with size of USB stick, format or something that the computer doesn't recognize at the boot stage.

 

Brand New Malibal Lotus -150HM Doubt anything on the beast is out of date.

Thanks

 

Anyone got any ideas as to what username/password openSUSE is looking for upon installation?

And, secondly, it appears most distros are still freezing up during installation.

HRM

 

What kind of installation is this - directly running it off USB ? If so where did you get the images from - you need to find out what is the password it was configured for - there is no such thing as a default password or something in linux at least....

If you had done an installation yourself - then it should have asked for the username and password during installation....

 

openSUSE is likely asking you for a username password because the install is failing in some way. In other words, it's not normal for the installation process to ask for a username/password. See this thread over at the openSUSE forum. To verify if this is the case, try what the poster there suggests for username/password, root/[enter]. That will at least tell you that the openSUSE install isn't working, along with the others you've tried.

I booted my P150HM with a USB drive configured via Unetbootin of Xubuntu 11.04, and I was able to get to a graphical desktop, but your hardware is slightly different from mine, (6970 vs 6990, Intel 6230 vs Bigfoot). I would suggest you create a bootable USB drive with 11.10, and see if the updated Xubuntu works with your hardware.

Finally it's hard to determine what the problem is without more information, but if everything else fails, you may want to consider a text based install of one of the distros.

Good Luck..

 

Thanks for the replies guys.

Ya, I tried a text install of openSUSE, it was prompting me for a usr/pass DURING the installation, and the download came from their official website.

Its really weird and beginning to really bug me. But I'll keep trying! honestly though, something is not right.

 

Maybe root with no password, then create your user? Or linux with no password? Or boot to live cd and install from there, instead of from the main menu of the livecd.

 

Usually when you start your install from a liveCD or equivalent - it shouldn't ask for any password for authenticating the install itself, but it should only ask for the password to set for the root and any other users created during the install.

Could you confirm how you got the liveCD ISO to be bootable from the USB ? Was it using unetbootin ? And are you selecting to install from the main LiveCD menu or launching the live opensuse and then after it loads the desktop choosing install ?

I've installed openSUSE form the LiveCD and I'm sure it never asks for any password to authenticate the install itself.

As far as I understand I'm guessing it just asks for the password for the accounts to be created i.e. root and any other users. Try giving some password of your choice and see what happens.