Creating live USB keys in Windows

[Luke Macken]

On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 09:44:40PM +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Luke Macken wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> So, I wrote some code that will install a Fedora Live ISO onto a USB
>> stick, in Windows.
>>
>> It automatically detects all removable drives, finds your ISO, extracts
>> it to your USB key, tweaks the syslinux.cfg, and installs the
>> bootloader.
>>
>> From a user perspective, using it is pretty simple:
>> - download fedora
>> - download and extract livecd-iso-to-usb.zip
>> - drag fedora iso into directory
>> - double click 'livecd-iso-to-usb.exe'
>> - ...profit!
>
> It works but there could be a few things smoothen out. Since it is a 
> command line app, there isn't any time to see a confirmation of success and 
> the window automatically closes.

Hmm, it's supposed to stay open and say "Done!".  Something must have
exploded.  Can you try the latest version and see if this still happens?
If so, you could run it in a terminal and see what it is doing.

> If you attempt to write again, the file overwrite options don't make it 
> clear that the USB has already been setup unlike when you run in Fedora.  

I've added a message that will appear before the overwrite prompt
letting the user know that a liveos is already installed.

> If it is FAT16 formatted, the command bails out and doesn't provide any 
> choices. 

Fixed.

> It claims NTFS is unrecognized and only works well with FAT32.

NTFS does not seem to be supported by syslinux.  Looks like we may be
out of luck with this one.

> A graphical app would be way better if it can be done but a very good start 
> nevertheless. Congrats.

Indeed, the code is nice and object-oriented, so throwing a gui on top
of it shouldn't be too difficult.

Latest bits: http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/livecd-iso-to-usb.zip

Thanks,

luke