i will recap the fight i am currently having in trying to create a
bootable USB drive from Ubuntu Server 24.04.3 ["24.04"], and i will
interac $100 to the first person who can solve the problem i am about
to describe. (i will start writing this up in detail at my
crashcourse.ca wiki, but i'll supply enough here that you will have
enough information to take a crack at it.)
previously, i described how i want to customize a 24.04 ISO image to
add some autoinstall configuration, but the problem here is way
simpler -- i just want to take that original ISO and turn it into a
bootable USB drive *as is*. but wait ... there's more.
if i just want an equivalent bootable USB drive from the ISO image,
well, that's trivial -- just "dd" from the ISO image to the USB drive.
that works just fine and, when i do that, the USB drive is recognized
by two different appliances i'm playing with when i go into the BIOS
on either appliance, go top the "Boot" menu, and i can see that both
BIOSes list the USB drive as a boot option. in short, those USB drives
are visible as bootable devices. and that's what i'm after.
but i don't just want to use "dd" -- that's too easy. rather, i want
to take the 24.04 ISO image and *unpack* it ("mount -o loop",
"bsdtar", whatever) to get the directory structure, which is where i
would add the autoinstall stuff, but i want to keep it simple, and
after i unpack the ISO image, i'm happy to *immediately* pack it up
again (unchanged) to get the equivalent bootable ISO image. then i can
"dd" that to a USB drive and boot from that.
that's it -- i want to take canonical's 24.04 ISO image, unpack it
(however you want), then recreate a bootable ISO image from that (most
likely with "xorriso"), dd to USB drive and boot from that. and from
my poking around, it seems like the work involves invoking "xorriso"
with all of the appropriate options, a good example seen here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1g0cq09/how_to_create_a_custom_ubuntu_24041_image_by/
that makefile ostensibly does what i want, except we can ignore all
the cloud-init stuff since i don't want to make any changes, and the
real work is done by the "ubuntu" target, which runs "xorriso" with a
truckload of options in order to recreate a bootable ISO image.
i used something very much like that but, no matter how i tweak it,
once i recreate an ISO image and copy to USB drive, neither appliance
recognizes that USB drive as a boot option, so i am clearly
overlooking something critical.
there's the $100 bounty -- figure out the magic incantation of
"xorriso" that allows me to do the above:
1) start with canonical 24.04.3 ubuntu server image
2) unpack into directory structure
3) use xorriso to immediately repack into bootable ISO image
4) copy to USB drive, and boot from that USB drive
i've played with those options all morning and haven't succeeded.
thoughts?
rday
To unsubscribe send a blank message to linux+unsubscribe [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To get help send a blank message to linux+help [ at ] linux-ottawa [ dot ] org
To visit the archives: https://lists.linux-ottawa.org