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can I burn a cd from a bootable usb stick?

8 years ago

My dvd/cd drive is old and will not recognize discs as empty medium but will play one. So do any of you know if its possible to make an install cd from a bootable usb stick? I use linux machines but have access to windows 7 that I can use if need be.

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Comments (10)

Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Linux... command line?

sudo fdisk -l

to see where the flash drive is mounted. In my case it was /dev/sdd

then

sudo dd conv=notrunc if="/dev/sdd" of="image.iso"

to make an image of the flash drive

then

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom image.iso

to burn the image onto a DVDR (my flash drive was 4 gigs)

I just tried it using the only thing I had handy, a bootable USB flash drive containing Super-Grub.

At the end, the DVDR booted. :)

Note: My first try failed because I used /dev/sdd1 instead of /dev/sdd so I didn't catch the entire drive, boot sector, etc.

What happens if you have a 16 gig bootable flash, I have no idea.

And as you probably already know, "dd" (Disk Druid) is also known as Disk Destroyer so... use at your own risk)

----------------

Of course the above assumes your DVD burner will make the burn. If it doesn't recognize an empty disk, I doubt it will burn one. Not that I wouldn't try anyway. :)
mikie_gw
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Little program called Rufus for windows will make bootable usb stick from an iso . If that's what your goal is. I believe win7 also from its file explorer, you can right click your usb drive and select format... it should have an option to make it a bootable dos drive.
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ponydrvr
Original Author
8 years ago
thank you! I agree the linux machine probably won't burn the cd anyway,plus I am very cautious about using the dd command. I am going to try to do this thing on the windows machine when I get the chance. Hope it works.

I have already made my usb with unetbootin. I tried rufus on the windows machine once before but it also downloaded a virus so I won't do that again.

The linux machine won't boot to usb either is why I am trying a workaround.

Thanks again!
aputernut
8 years ago
Use the Windows PC and here's a link may be of help?

http://www.any-data-rescue.com/resource/How-to-burn-a-bootable-usb-flash-drive.html
ponydrvr
Original Author
8 years ago
Thanks! But I don't want to put the distro on the windows machine since it is not mine. And yes, the usb will boot on it. I just need to burn it to a cd. then I can format the stick and use it again.
Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Can you use the bootable USB to boot a live version of Linux on the Windows machine, then download the distro and burn it to CD/DVDR? The Windows machine has a usable burner, correct?

Edit: Oops, got my head stuck in Linux, suppose you could download the ISO and burn it in Windows just as easy. :)
ponydrvr
Original Author
8 years ago
Thanks! Yes,I thought of that last night. That's what I'm going to do. That is the best solution since I can go online with the linux usb and not have to worry about any viruses being picked up by windows since I don't know how good their virus protection is.
Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
8 years ago
Yeah, I bet that works. The only hitch might be finding space to download the iso. You'd either have to have enough free space on the flash drive that you're booting to, mount the windows drive and use that, or plug in a second flash. I'm sure you'll figure that out though.

Good luck, and let us know how it turns out. :)
ponydrvr
Original Author
8 years ago
Well I successfully made a copy of bodhi..so yay! Next I am trying to make one for absolute linux which said it was 686 mb but after downloading it is 720 mb which is too large for a cd. I can remove some files I guess but am not sure which ones I need. Google has not been helpful,lol.

I added about 2 gigs of space on my flash which is 8 gigs but fear I may have used it.

How would I go about mounting the windows drive from here?
Richard (Vero Beach, Florida)
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Linux, at least the Linux I'm running, fairly recently decided the "correct" way to express a file size is in base 10 rather than base 2. All my 700mb movie rips suddenly jumped to 735 mb. As far as I'm concerned, they could have left that alone. :)

Anyway, that 720 MB image should fit on a 700 Mib CD just fine. http://wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html

Actually if you ls -lh the iso in a command window, it will probably say it's about 686 mb, so they're not even consistent with it.

If you still need to mount the Windows drive, can you open the file explorer, find the Windows drive listed on the left, click it and have it automount? My Linux Mint does, I don't know about bodhi.

Command line it would go something like:
1. sudo fdisk -l to determine where the Windows partition is located... something like /dev/sda1
2. mkdir windows to make a folder to mount it
3. sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 windows to mount it

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