Creating a bootable usb with unetbootin.

taeom · Aug 8, 2023

I tried to make a bootable usb with UNETBOOTIN™ and it never works, showing this error.

The directory /media/General_UDisk__s1 is out of space. Press 'Yes' to abort installation, 'No' to ignore this error and attempt to continue installation, and 'No to All' to ignore all out-of-space errors.

Pressing "No to All", the installation proceeds Showing No signs of error at all.
Untill booting. the bios desplay "BOOT ERROR" which leads to 2 suspicions.
1) THE USB DRIVE THAT I USE:
formatting the drive in FAT32 system I did set cluster size to 512-bit, which the drive size is 2gigs btw..
By using

Code:

newfs_msdos -L UBUNTU -s 2000000 -c 512 -F 32 /dev/da0s1

Which in most humble cunclusion leads to the Idea that the drive is formatted in a very horrible way. the wrong type of horrible.
which makes the drive full capacity (40 mbs).
note that I had freebsd ver 13 installed on it and installed lubuntu ver18.4 lts on it without deleting anything but partations in formatting.
2) the unetbootin software
it might have been that I did not set it right. Is there any special ways to set it?
And a last request
If there is any alternatives I will be most thankful to know them, thanks

and sorry for making it long it's my first time publishing in a forum.
/taem

balanga · Aug 8, 2023

What are trying to boot? And which OS are you running?

ralphbsz · Aug 8, 2023

What boot image are you using? What format is it in? Most boot images that you download are intended to be copied to the boot media completely, starting at the first sector of the boot device. They typically contain a partition table, boot sector, and the file system that the boot loader will use. If that's the type of image you are using, it is completely irrelevant what kind of msdos file system you put on the device beforehand.

Next question: Why do you use these strange parameters when creating the FAT file system. Can you explain the reasoning behind it?

And: What is this unetbootin software? Can you describe it? What does it do? Why don't you just use dd or cat to write the boot media?

One thing that makes me particularly suspicious is that you get an error about a file system /media/... being full. If you are writing an image to the boot media, there should be no file system involved.

jbo@ · Aug 8, 2023

Hello & Welcome to this FreeBSD community!

As others pointed out: It might be helpful to explain what you're actually trying to achieve to prevent the XY-Problem.
Generally, as pointed out by ralphbsz, when you grab an installation media as a *.img from somewhere (eg. the FreeBSD memstick image), you'd just byte-copy it to the flash drive and you're good. These images contain the partition table and everything so it's as easy as:

Code:

dd if=/path/to/your/image.img of=/dev/daX status=progress

Note that the output device (the of= argument) points to the device node itself, not to an already existing partition.

Alain De Vos · Aug 8, 2023

which img file do you try add where did you get it from

taeom · Aug 19, 2023

jbo said:
Hello & Welcome to this FreeBSD community!

As others pointed out: It might be helpful to explain what you're actually trying to achieve to prevent the XY-Problem.
Generally, as pointed out by ralphbsz, when you grab an installation media as a *.img from somewhere (eg. the FreeBSD memstick image), you'd just byte-copy it to the flash drive and you're good. These images contain the partition table and everything so it's as easy as:

Code:

dd if=/path/to/your/image.img of=/dev/daX status=progress

Note that the output device (the of= argument) points to the device node itself, not to an already existing partition.

Sorry for taking so long!
I was trying to make a bootable usb flash in FREEBSD 13, using unetbootin : the image i used ( actually ISO file) was the LUBUNTU 16.04 LTS downloaded from the Main website!
I sadly didn't know about the dd command and Truly feeling ashamed of it XD, Anyhow I did in the end finish this buy running RUFUS on an another computer of mine.
Anyhow, I did now know about the dd command, Thanks a lot for everyone that helped! Best wishes
/taeom

dgmm · Aug 22, 2023

taeom said:
Sorry for taking so long!
I was trying to make a bootable usb flash in FREEBSD 13, using unetbootin : the image i used ( actually ISO file) was the LUBUNTU 16.04 LTS downloaded from the Main website!
I sadly didn't know about the dd command and Truly feeling ashamed of it XD, Anyhow I did in the end finish this buy running RUFUS on an another computer of mine.
Anyhow, I did now know about the dd command, Thanks a lot for everyone that helped! Best wishes
/taeom

Just be aware that the dd command can't make any random ISO file into a bootable USB thumbdrive or SD card, even if the ISO file is described as bootable. Some will be created so as to boot from a thumb drive OR by burning to CD/DVD Generally, suitable files for USB thumbdrives or SD cards will have a .img extension or more likely, a .img.gz extension so needs decompressing before or during the dd copy. There are tools to make ISOs bootable "as is" from thumb drives and SD cards such as Ventoy, mostly useful for making a multiboot thumb drive with multiple, bootable ISOs on it.

balanga · Aug 22, 2023

dgmm said:
Just be aware that the dd command can't make any random ISO file into a bootable USB thumbdrive or SD card, even if the ISO file is described as bootable. Some will be created so as to boot from a thumb drive OR by burning to CD/DVD Generally, suitable files for USB thumbdrives or SD cards will have a .img extension or more likely, a .img.gz extension so needs decompressing before or during the dd copy. There are tools to make ISOs bootable "as is" from thumb drives and SD cards such as Ventoy, mostly useful for making a multiboot thumb drive with multiple, bootable ISOs on it.

I would definitely recommend Ventoy for creating a multi boot device. I'd been dabbling with creating my own multiboot disk for several years, but I'm really pleased that someone on this forum put me on to Ventoy. I installed it on a GPT partitioned disk with all the ISO and imgs (most of which are bootable) on one partition, and then you can install verious OSes, including FreeBSD in their own partition.
You can even use a FreeBSD img to install a working system on a new partition.