On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 10:23 AM pmkellly@frontier.com pmkellly@frontier.com wrote:
I've seen several ISOs lately that after they were written to a thumb drive using media writer they wouldn't boot. I won't be recounting the details I sent in prior motes to @test, but here is a little more information.
The last one I tried was Workstation Live 0207.n.0. It failed to boot initially, but I rewrote the same downloaded image to the same thumb drive with Media Writer again. After that it would boot. This might raise the possibility that Media Writer is involved with the boot problems. I guess I'll just keep track of this from now on.
I have been using the same thumb drive plugged into the same USB port all along. Today just for grins I ran badblocks on the thumb drive and no bad blocks were found. "badblocks -w -s -o Thumberror.log /dev/sdb)"
I would use f3. The gist is format the USB stick (file system doesn't matter) and mount it. Then
sudo f3write /mnt sudo f3read /mnt
But the thing is, transient errors from USB sticks is a real thing. Also, I once had a USB stick that would transiently corrupt on writes if the dd bs size was too high. I forget the value. But somehow it'd either lose writes or reorder them, and I'd get a completely bootable USB stick but it'd spew piles of file system errors during the installation.
https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 https://fight-flash-fraud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Side note: With 0207 I once again encountered the white screen sad face. when I rebooted after the initial install to do the complete the install tasks. The complete the install windows popped up on top of the sad face and I was able to coomplete the install. I did a restart after completing the install. The restart ran normally and I have seen no problems. Though I havent tested 0207 extensively. I'll get started again when Branched F34 is available.
This could also be transient corruptions on read. USB sticks notoriously do not report discrete read errors, they just return bad data.