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Alternative (f)or Ubuntu's usb-creator in Mint Debian

Posted: Sat Jan 08, 2011 5:47 pm
by RavanH
Looking for that sleek feature in Ubuntu that allowed me to create a Startup Disk from any Live CD image on a USB drive, I discovered the following. Just wanted to share it. Do with it what you want ;)

The feauture I am talking about is provided by the packages usb-creator-common and usb-creator-gtk in Ubuntu. These packages are not available in the Debian repository so I tried downloading them from the Ubuntu repositories and installing them:
http:// packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/all/usb-creator-common/download
http:// packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/all/usb-creator-gtk/download

This went without problems (automatically installing some 5 dependancies) and got me the familiar item "Startup Disk Creator" in the menu.

... BUT ...

Trying the program, writing an ISO image to my pendrive, the process ALWAYS seems to end in an error about some file missing from the created boot image. And sure enough, booting from the USB drive does not work...

So is there an alternative for this Ubuntu tool in Debian? Well, I could not find anything about it via Google but after going manually through the list of Debian Testing packages on http://packages.debian.org/testing/allpackages (searching for "usb") I came across this package:
unetbootin (471-2)
installer of Linux/BSD distributions to a partition or USB drive

The description sounded good enough so I went on to install it with

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install unetbootin
in a terminal window. Now I got another new menu item. This time under System Tools: UNetbootin (not a very clear title and no menu icon)

This tool is not as easy to use (more options, less intuitive) as the Ubuntu variant but it does look like it's a bit more versatile. I was able to select the ISO image and the USB partition to write to. And after writing the image, this time the process closed with a Success message asking to reboot into the new install (or not).

This looks much more promising :)

So now, I will be rebooting to see if it worked and if it does not, I will come back here to ask what I can try next. But if I do not come back with that question, you can consider this a sort of live-report-how-to ;)

Re: Alternative (f)or Ubuntu's usb-creator in Mint Debian

Posted: Sun Jan 09, 2011 5:07 am
by vincent
Unetbootin was my tool of choice before usb-creator-gtk was bundled along with Ubuntu/Mint, and it still is. Well, as with many other things in Linux, there's often more than one way to complete a task.