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linuxmint / mintstick

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Detect non-hybrid ISOs? #80

Open knghtbrd opened 3 years ago

knghtbrd commented 3 years ago

Could mintstick detect non-hybrid ISO images and issue an error (or at least a warning) that the resulting stick might not be bootable?

I don't expect there is a desire for mintstick to become Rufus or WoeUSB-ng, so writing ISO files that need to be manipulated to make them work is likely to remain out of scope. But that means the program is really going to work for hybrid images only. Something with a partition table, essentially. And it's easy enough to determine if there is one present or not to tell the user that they need something else, rather than perform the operation and fail silently.

clefebvre commented 1 year ago

Are you talking about Windows ISOs? If so this is addressed now on master.

If not, please give us more details on the detection you recommend and an example of an ISO to test.

knghtbrd commented 1 year ago

I had Windows ISOs in mind, but I was thinking about the general case of a CD/DVD image (so without a partition table) being burned to a USB stick instead of a small Frisbee. A generally EFI-based amd64 PC isn't going to be able to boot the resulting USB stick because it doesn't contain a recognized MBR/GPT partition table.

I actually don't know if an Intel-based Mac would boot a Mac-bootable ISO file written to a USB stick without a partition table. I know that when you use Apple's Disk Utility to Restore a bootable install .dmg to a hard drive, it creates a partition table on the drive—GPT, GPT/MBR, or Apple Partition Map in the PowerPC days—though that last one isn't a major consideration really as Mint does not run on such hardware.

(Randomly, I looked at the Haiku ISO file—it's a hybrid iso9660/GPT disklabel setup like a Linux distribution uses.)