best way to build bootable f23 USB drives from f23?

[Tod Merley]

First of all not all flash drives boot – and even if you get one that does
the next lot might not. This has to do with the firmware between the data
on the drive and the USB interface. Often there is a firmware virtual CD
involved.


If you look on the drive with such as gparted you will likely see a bit of
“unused” space near the front of the drive. Sometimes that is where the
firmware is and/or virtual CD and/or optimization data which allows for the
best data transfer performance from the drive is located. Sometimes if you
touch that (such as write over it with dd) the drive will become unusably
slow.


I used to use F20 and then F21 for some special drives. But F22 for me had
too much initial “updates” to make the process practical. It would
literally take at least 2/3 of the day to do the updates mostly, I assume,
because the data transfer became so slow in this process.


Most USB making software that I have run across do overwrite the beginning
of the disk often making it very slow. I like to “shrink” the existing
factory partition from the back of the drive on a 16G I would leave about
500mb of the original and install the Linux on the freed up space leaving
the front of the drive untouched except for the MBR.


I think something like Clonezilla could be trained to do the copy process
using images and special procedures to make sure the front of the drive is
not touched and that extra room is left at the back of the drive as even in
the same drives lots tend to be different sizes.


Performance of flash drives booting Linux is likely to be a constant source
of frustration especially for something as complex as Fedora. You will need
a drive with good transfer rates to begin with. A lite version of another
Linux might well be a better choice. Better yet I find that an mSATA drive
in a USB3 converter box has performance good enough to be usable for most
anything. At present I can put a 30G version together for about $50 and a
few more will get me 64G.


If you need the economy of a flash drive to make the project work I would
recommend other than Fedora or a perhaps a light version if one exists or
can be made. I ended up giving up on Fedora for my flash drive project due
to the crazy large initial updates process – and - thinking about it as you
are I know I would have to use a very surgically accurate method to copy to
the many drives while preserving the front of the drive and dealing with
all the many sizes of the production runs.


Finding a drive that works well will be your first item I do believe.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 5:07 AM, Martin Bříza <mbriza at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 12:36:28 +0100, Robert P. J. Day <
> rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>
>
>>   for an upcoming class, i want to create bootable 64-bit fedora 23
>> systems on (probably) 16G USB drives. given that i want to do this
>> from a running fedora 23 system, and it can be a totally destructive
>> creation, what's the best way?
>>
>>   as i see it, i would probably do a single, initial install onto one
>> USB drive, then "dd" that image to all the rest. the USB drives need
>> to be writable, and (obviously) bootable from any system.
>>
>>   so far, i've found this wiki page:
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_and_use_Live_USB
>>
>> and am looking at the liveusb-creator package. am i on the right
>> track?
>>
>> rday
>>
>>
> Hi,
>
> there's the Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool, you could give that a shot.
> It's hosted on [1] and you can get pre-built packages from [2].
> If you want the flash drives to still be write-able, don't use the
> destructive mode and make sure the flash drives are FAT32 formatted.
> Feel free to ask anything (even directly) or report any issues/enhancement
> requests.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> [1] https://github.com/lmacken/liveusb-creator
> [2] https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/mbriza/liveusb-creator/
>
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