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[OCLUG-Tech] how to format a USB drive for windows to get at an ISO image?

  • Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] how to format a USB drive for windows to get at an ISO image?
  • From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca>
  • Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 16:39:20 -0500 (EST)
  i'm feeling like an idiot right now so i'm just going to ask ... i
have a bunch of 8G USB drives that i want to format to contain an ISO
image of RHEL 7 for a class tomorrow where students will plug in the
drive into a windows box, then install RHEL 7 in either vmware player
or virtualbox. sounds simple, right?

  so what is the recipe for formatting the USB drives properly?

  i'm doing this on fedora 22, and i obviously want the combination of
fdisk and mkfs that lets me format, pop out the USB drive, then plug
it back in and have it automount, just as a sanity check.

  i've tried various combinations of fdisk partition types and mkfs,
and i have yet to get to the point where, after running something
like mkfs.vfat, i can remove the drive, then plug it back in and have
it recognized.

  so what's the secret? first, in fdisk, what partition type should i
set the partition to? and once i do that, write and quit, which
variation of "mkfs" should i run?

  this really shouldn't be that hard, but i just can't make it work.

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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