Re: Help Creating A Bootable USB Disk

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>]

Quoting 'Christian Peeples' via BerkeleyLUG (berkeleylug@googlegroups.com):

> I am finally getting around to upgrading to 20.4, but I seem to be
> stuck on step one.  I went to Ubuntu for instructions and read the
> instructions and watched the video.  The first thing that one is to do
> is create a bootable USB stick.  I got a couple of brand new 8 GB USB
> sticks from Frys.  I opened Startup Disk Creator from the
> applications.  It detected the USB stick I had inserted and asked if I
> wanted to erase it.  I clicked on that.  The program did its thing and
> opened the USB stick in "Files" as a blank disk.  When I went back to
> "Make a Startup Disk," the selection of how much space to allocate to
> documents and settings was greyed out.  More importantly, the box for
> "Make Startup Disk" was greyed out.  

You gravitated towards a Desktop Environment aka DE (GNOME, as packaged
by Ubuntu Linux) that includes an automounter.  I rather dislike
automounters, because (by definition & by design) they autodetect
whenever you've attached a device with mountable filesystems and mount
them in background at mountpoints of their choosing, without bothering
to ask you whether you want them mounted or where you wish the
mountpoint to be.

So, it is common for novices like you, having been subtly pushed towards
(IMO) overly complicated DEs and distributions, end up thereafter taken
by surprise by being inexplicably prevented from doing partition
operations, because of the device already having been mounted in
background, e.g., busy.

My _own_ response to this situation would be to say 'The hell with
GNOME, and let's in particular lose its automounter daemon.'  Since it's
unlikely you'll make the same decision, I guess the alternative will be
to cultivate awareness of what the automounter is doing in background,
and prepare to intervene to unmount filesystems when, e.g., you want to
overwrite the device in question.

Web-searching about GNOME suggests you should check the 'Disks' applet
to check the mounted/unmounted status of connected removable drives --
and to toggle that status.  Apparently, the GNOME automounter uses
/media/[blahblah] as the mountpoint directories, for such removable
drives.

-- 
Cheers,            You must rise or sink / You must conquer or win, 
Rick Moen          Or serve and lose. / Suffer or triumph, / Be anvil or hammer.
rick@linuxmafia.com 
McQ! (4x80)        -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gesellige Lieder, Ein Anderes 

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