Ubuntu 9.10 - Won't make a boot disk

[W1GUH]

So I thought I'd make one of my external hard drives into a boot disk & save myself the trouble of swapping the internal hard drive. After most of an afternoon I gave up....just couldn't do it.

In the "Make boot disk" gui, the first thing it asks for is where to get the image from. So I tried to tell it, over and over. It refused to accept anything. After hitting "open" in the file requester, the file never showed up in the window of the gui. Could be I was telling it the wrong type of file...but then, the instructions said to us the ".iso" file, AND the file requester came up defaulted to that file type. And that's the kind of file it refused to accept. It didn't actually say it didn't accept it...it just didn't put it in the window in the main "Create Boot Disk" gui.

So I thought that maybe it doesn't need to be there, so I told it to make a certain drive a boot drive. It did that wonderfully well! Trouble is....the computer recognized it as a boot disk, but couldn't find a boot image. Well, DUH! Of course it couldn't because the stupid gui didn't put it there because it didn't seem to be talking to the filre requester.

But then things got nasty. Somehow, in this process, that disk became unreadable by linux. No big deal, it started out empty, so nothing's lost. But what depressed me is I couldn't do anything with that hard drive because linux refused. I couldn't even format it. If I tried to linux gave me a snide (well, not really, but after hours of dealing with this it certainly seemed snide! ) response and said it can't do anything. So.......(Wah! Sob!! Growl!!!) I had to go back to windows to re-format that drive.

Mostly a ranting dump...but if anyone sees anything I did wrong, of course I'd like to hear from you. This kind of stuff really wearies me to the point where now, I'm content to stick to windows because if I boot up linux sure as shinola I'll migrate to fixing this problem....probably only to spend ANOTHER 3 hours finding out that I can't!

[ad4mg]

So I thought I'd make one of my external hard drives into a boot disk & save myself the trouble of swapping the internal hard drive. After most of an afternoon I gave up....just couldn't do it.

In the "Make boot disk" gui, the first thing it asks for is where to get the image from. So I tried to tell it, over and over. It refused to accept anything. After hitting "open" in the file requester, the file never showed up in the window of the gui. Could be I was telling it the wrong type of file...but then, the instructions said to us the ".iso" file, AND the file requester came up defaulted to that file type. And that's the kind of file it refused to accept. It didn't actually say it didn't accept it...it just didn't put it in the window in the main "Create Boot Disk" gui.

So I thought that maybe it doesn't need to be there, so I told it to make a certain drive a boot drive. It did that wonderfully well! Trouble is....the computer recognized it as a boot disk, but couldn't find a boot image. Well, DUH! Of course it couldn't because the stupid gui didn't put it there because it didn't seem to be talking to the filre requester.

But then things got nasty. Somehow, in this process, that disk became unreadable by linux. No big deal, it started out empty, so nothing's lost. But what depressed me is I couldn't do anything with that hard drive because linux refused. I couldn't even format it. If I tried to linux gave me a snide (well, not really, but after hours of dealing with this it certainly seemed snide! ) response and said it can't do anything. So.......(Wah! Sob!! Growl!!!) I had to go back to windows to re-format that drive.

Mostly a ranting dump...but if anyone sees anything I did wrong, of course I'd like to hear from you. This kind of stuff really wearies me to the point where now, I'm content to stick to windows because if I boot up linux sure as shinola I'll migrate to fixing this problem....probably only to spend ANOTHER 3 hours finding out that I can't!

It looks like you went through the proper steps, Paul. I've done this twice, once with an ISO file, and once with a Live CD in the drive. The first time, I made my 4GB USB thumb drive bootable, the second time, I used an external 60GB USB drive. Both times, the process completed without any problems.

One of two possibilities come to mind ...
- a corrupted .iso file
- do you have permissions to open the .iso file ?

You can check and change, if necessary, the permissions from a terminal window. Open a terminal and navigate to where the .iso file is. As an example, I'll use the Ubuntu 8.10 .iso I just copied to my desktop (prompt in green):

lukeb@Acer_E500:~$ cd Desktop
lukeb@Acer_E500:~/Desktop$ ls -l

the owner of the file should be whatever username you use. If it is root, change the owner like so:

lukeb@Acer_E500:~/Desktop$ sudo chown lukeb:lukeb ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso

substitute your username for mine (lukeb) in that command

verify that the permissions allow you to open the file, should be at least - rw - r - - r - - (which is 644 numerically)
it's safe enough to open the permissions wide open long enough to do the disk, so change it to 777 like so:

lukeb@Acer_E500:~/Desktop$ sudo chmod 777 ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso

when you do the "ls -l" command, the permissions for that file should now show: - rwxrwxrwx (777 numerically)

---------------------------------

Those two suggestions are my best guess. I found making an external USB drive a bootable Ubuntu disk very easy.

[KC2UGV]

Well, you could waste an external HD by making it simply a live CD, but why not just install the OS to the UBS drive by booting from the CD?

[ad4mg]

Well, you could waste an external HD by making it simply a live CD, but why not just install the OS to the UBS drive by booting from the CD?

Good suggestion. I chopped off some space and created a small partition to do the job on that larger drive.

For the thumb drive, I marked the installation as "persistent", so I could do a few updates, and store files on it.

[W1GUH]

I doubt if it was protection. I suppose that the symptom of trying to do it from a file I don't have permission to read could be a mute "no action at all, but that's unlikely. As I said, the GUI behaves like somebody forgot to use the path and file name from the file requester.

I found a way to make a boot disk from a terminal, and I'll be trying that eventually. I'll let you know what happens.

BTW....your procedure had a useful effect...reminding me of the "sudo" command. That's a new one for me....I've always just used the root password...but Ubuntu doesn't let you do that!

[n2ize]

So I thought I'd make one of my external hard drives into a boot disk & save myself the trouble of swapping the internal hard drive. After most of an afternoon I gave up....just couldn't do it.

Can't you just simply make a dual boot system ? That's what I do here. There are 2 internal drives in the machine, one for windows and one for fedora. At boot time I simply use GRUB to select which OS want to boot into. No need to swap drives, no need for boot discs, etc.

[W1GUH]

So I thought I'd make one of my external hard drives into a boot disk & save myself the trouble of swapping the internal hard drive. After most of an afternoon I gave up....just couldn't do it.

Can't you just simply make a dual boot system ? That's what I do here. There are 2 internal drives in the machine, one for windows and one for fedora. At boot time I simply use GRUB to select which OS want to boot into. No need to swap drives, no need for boot discs, etc.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm setting out to do, except that the linux drive will be an external USB drive. I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track because one of those external drives "thinks" it's a boot drive (only without the boot image), and I used GRUB last night to telll the computer to boot from the internal drive. Also, I'd bet that the command line procedure from a terminal window will work just fine....I just have to get the energy to swap the disk and try it. Just gotta be "mentally prepared" to spend, possibly, a few hours doing it if things go like they can. You know, where it's almost working, and it takes you, literally hours, to find that one simple thing that'll make it work! The joys of computers. :monkeydance:

[n2ize]

So I thought I'd make one of my external hard drives into a boot disk & save myself the trouble of swapping the internal hard drive. After most of an afternoon I gave up....just couldn't do it.

Can't you just simply make a dual boot system ? That's what I do here. There are 2 internal drives in the machine, one for windows and one for fedora. At boot time I simply use GRUB to select which OS want to boot into. No need to swap drives, no need for boot discs, etc.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm setting out to do, except that the linux drive will be an external USB drive. I'm pretty sure I'm on the right track because one of those external drives "thinks" it's a boot drive (only without the boot image), and I used GRUB last night to telll the computer to boot from the internal drive. Also, I'd bet that the command line procedure from a terminal window will work just fine....I just have to get the energy to swap the disk and try it. Just gotta be "mentally prepared" to spend, possibly, a few hours doing it if things go like they can. You know, where it's almost working, and it takes you, literally hours, to find that one simple thing that'll make it work! The joys of computers. :monkeydance:

Okay I gotcha... A few weeks ago I spend a few days trying to resolve an issue with a wi-fi card on a laptop. Twas so close to working but not quite. Eventually turned out the hard drive was beginning to fail and it was encountering subtle read/write/seek errors. Once I replaced the drive everything gelled.

I generally hate troubleshooting and fixing computers. I much prefer using them to perform useful tasks. Round here I do mostly Lisp, C, and Assembly programming and a lot of number crunching, recursions, etc.

[KC2UGV]

I generally hate troubleshooting and fixing computers. I much prefer using them to perform useful tasks. Round here I do mostly Lisp, C, and Assembly programming and a lot of number crunching, recursions, etc.

I thought you said you prefer using them for "useful tasks".... Lisp!? C?!?! Assembly!?!?!?!! Try perl, or python. It will appear a whole new world to you.

:rofl:

[n2ize]

I generally hate troubleshooting and fixing computers. I much prefer using them to perform useful tasks. Round here I do mostly Lisp, C, and Assembly programming and a lot of number crunching, recursions, etc.

I thought you said you prefer using them for "useful tasks".... Lisp!? C?!?! Assembly!?!?!?!! Try perl, or python. It will appear a whole new world to you.

:rofl:

Lisp IS quite useful.

I've been using Perl for over a decade. It's a great language. Useful for many tasks and often my language of choice when I need to cook up something quick and efficient. I probably write in Perl more often than anything else.

For low level routines I generally like to dabble around with a combo of C and Assembly. Assembly less often these days because most compilers can optimize things better than i can. Nonetheless a working knowledge of Assembly helps one to understand what's going on "under the hood". It also helps to better understand some of those messages the debugger spits out. It also helps in gaining a clearer understanding of just how the machine manipulates things like floating point arithmetic.

Lisp may be old and conjure up images of the ancient and archaic days of computing. But don't sell Lisp short. For some projects Lisp cannot be surpassed. As a mathematician I find that I can translate abstract or semi-abstract ideas into workable code quicker and more efficiently with Lisp than with C, Perl, Java, etc. I can often accomplish with Lisp is a couple of lines of code what it would take many more lines in other languages. Lisp does have a certain robust adaptability and flexibility not found in many other languages. There is good reason why it was/is favoured by the artificial intelligence community. I am not alone. To this date Lisp retains an active community of users among academics, professionals and hackers alike. There is a certain elegance to Lisp that is quite valid and makes it particularly useful.

That said, I see computer languages as tools to complete a job. I have no favourite language in the sense that I have no favourite tool. rather the tool that is best suited for the task at hand is the one I favour at any given moment. For some things I would jump right to Perl and never even consider Lisp. For other things I would jump right to C. And for other jobs Lisp fits the bill perfectly.

Speaking of Python I hope to learn that language one of these days.