12

I have a broken DVD drive and no others available right now to burn a DVD iso to so I'd like to use a empty hard disk instead.

I've tried Unetbootin but that only copies a few megabytes of files - the rest of the image data in the ISO is ignored.

I have verified the ISO is valid and working with VirtualBox. It's MD5 hash is also as expected. But I need to boot at the real BIOS not an emulated one.

I've also tried things like:

sudo cat /disk/image.iso > /dev/sdb1

and that got "Permission denied" - no idea why.

studiohack
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Luke Stanley
  • 843

5 Answers5

11

In the end I used dd and a USB stick as a boot disk because somehow booting didn't seem to work for the dvd on the hard disk.

sudo dd if=/storeM/os-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=8M

sudo dd if=/storeM/bootdisk.img of=/dev/sdc
Luke Stanley
  • 843
7

For information, since this hits a lot of people using sudo while writing to a file. Here's what happens if you use the cat command:

sudo cat /disk/image.iso > /dev/sdb1

is interpreted by the shell as executing sudo cat /disk/image.iso and then sending output to /dev/sdb1. Only the cat command is privileged; the output redirection isn't.

dd avoids these problems since source and target are arguments and part of the privileged command.

Christoph Burschka
  • 71
7

There is a difference between an ISO image (for cd) and a hard disk image (applicable to usb also). It is however possible to adjust the iso image, so that it fulfil the requirements of a hard disk image. Such an iso image is called hybrid iso. Linux has a tool that does this adjustment: isohybrid.

So here's what I did with success:

cp orig_image.iso hybrid.iso
isohybrid hybrid.iso
dd if=hybrid.iso of=/dev/sdd_ bs=8M

On Debian 8 the utility is contained in package syslinux-utils.

Community
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Jarekczek
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2

You can use MEMDISK to boot an optical image from a hard drive.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
  • 114,604
1

I would consider downloading the file again, also check the integrity, there is a reason you're facing errors. I've never had a problem with UNetBootin.

You can also try Universal USB Installer if you have a Windows system spare. EasyBCD also has an option to insert an ISO to be bootable from the Windows Bootloader, the iso can be executed from memory or the hard disk but is experimental.

Sandeep Bansal
  • 6,452