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, 12 Nov 2015 12:36:28 +0100, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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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