Re: Help Creating A Bootable USB Disk

[Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>]

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

> Thanks. Jitsied into SFlug and got a great deal of help Tom and
> Michael (including error checking from the terminal), found out one of
> the thumb drives I had bought was defective.  We got it done and am
> now using 20.4 LTS.

Excellent.  Yes, defective media would do that, too.  Echoing Michael's
point, the GUIfied tools tend to hide / discard debugging information, 
with the result that when something goes wrong, you have little idea 
what happened and why.  This is one of a number of reasons to gravitate
towards standard command-line tools, at least when doing debugging.  
E.g., first check in the dammned GNOME 'Disks' app to make sure the 
device's filesystem(s) hasn't (/haven't) been mounted, and unmount if
mounted.  Then, open a terminal and do:

$ dmesg | tail  #Notice whether it's /dev/sdb or whatever, and 
                #whether it has partitions, e.g., /dev/sdb1
$ sudo su -  #Be wary that you're using root authority after
             #this, which is why the prompt changes from $ to #,
             #so that you're aware and on-guard.
# fdisk -l /dev/sdb  #Or whatever the device is.
                     #This command displays its partition table, if any.

If worried that the flash drive (or other external drive might be a dud, 
you can experimentally format it.  Like this would format flash drive
/dev/sdb's first partition /dev/sdb1 as FAT32:

# mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdc1
# exit  #Stop wielding root-user authority, now.
$

Old-school tools for overwriting a disk from a disk-image file includ
dd.

> The only problem I have had is getting my scanner to work.   I called
> HP and they say they no longer support Linux.  I am working on it.

You're probably overreading the phrase 'we no longer support'.  That
merely means they refuse to assist you.  It tells you nothing whatsoever
about whether there is easy support in open source (or proprietary
alternative software, notably VueScan) for your scanner.

If you would please look carefully at your scanner and tell this mailing
list its model number, it'll then be possible to assist you.

So, do that, please.

It's highly likely that there is good open source driver support for
your scanner, though at any given time some models are problem children,
typically models that are either extremely new, or are all-in-one
devices, or both.

-- 
Cheers,                          "Maybe the law ain't perfect, but it's the only
Rick Moen                        one we got, and without it we got nuthin'."
rick@linuxmafia.com              -- U.S. Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, circa 1875
McQ! (4x80)        

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BerkeleyLUG" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to berkeleylug+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/berkeleylug/20200804033635.GH29756%40linuxmafia.com.