Howto make USB boot drives

[C.S.Cameron]

I think this restore home option is a first for bootable USB makers, good work.

Sooo... I was just noticing that Startup Disk Creator now comes with QEMU, making it easy to test the finished flash drive without having to reboot the computer.
MultiBootUSB also comes with a QEMU app.

Do you think it would be worth adding QEMU to mkusb?

If it is part of SDC then it is installed by default and only needs to be triggered when mkusb has completed an install.
I don't think it would add any bulk to the mkusb app.

[sudodus]

@C.S.Cameron,

Thanks for the tip about QEMU I will think about it, and see if I can use it, but I don't know how to do it in an easy way right now.

(I have use KVM with virt-manager (which is related to QEMU) but I have not used QEMU directly, except maybe several years ago.)

[C.S.Cameron]

Oops, I was wrong. QEMU does not come with SDC and I can't figure out how it got there, see:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1049...p-disk-creator

[sudodus]

@C.S.Cameron,

I read your question at AskUbuntu. I tested in my Lubuntu 18.04 LTS, and I had no luck there either even though some QEMU packages are installed, but not the package qemu itself.

[C.S.Cameron]

For me Test Disk started working in SDC after running:

sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu virt-manager virt-viewer libvirt-bin

There is some possibility it might be a combination of other QEMU commands I ran.

I will zero the disk and try again if you don't get it working.

[sudodus]

I will have a look at it, probably in a dedicated system that I set up in a separate computer (not my main computer). And it may take some time. Input from you is welcome in the meantime

[C.S.Cameron]

Zeroed the full USB using mkusb, installed Persistent Ubuntu 18.04 using mkusb defaults, booted USB and ran sudo apt-get install qemu-kvm qemu virt-manager virt-viewer libvirt-bin , rebooted and made a Live USB using Startup Disk Creator, option to Test Disk appeared at end of installation.

[sudodus]

That makes it easy to implement a testing environment, @C.S.Cameron,

It could be a good idea to look at the code of usb-creator-gtk to see how 'test' is implemented. I think it is a python script.

[oygle]

Currently following up on a problem where the booting process hangs at post login. It may be some backlight issue, but I would like to update the BIOS on this Dell Laptop Inspiron 3542. But how do you update with a non Windows OS ? Dell have a guide at Updating the Dell BIOS in Linux and Ubuntu Environments

I'd much prefer to use mkusb though, so may ask on the Dell forum for them to change it. What is "disks" anyway ? I don't have that. Plus the Dell article states we will be notified if the BIOS needs updating. Nope, doesn't happen. Anyway, most of those issues I need to chase up with Dell; just checking here that mkusb is valid to use for updating the BIOS.

[sudodus]

Currently following up on a problem where the booting process hangs at post login. It may be some backlight issue, but I would like to update the BIOS on this Dell Laptop Inspiron 3542. But how do you update with a non Windows OS ? Dell have a guide at Updating the Dell BIOS in Linux and Ubuntu Environments

Dell's link looks good. Please notice that there is a difference between systems 2015 onwards and systems before 2015. I found documentation for your computer model from 2014, but the computer might still be manufactured 2015 onwards, so I don't know what to select.

Maybe it is safest to use FreeDOS.

I'd much prefer to use mkusb though, so may ask on the Dell forum for them to change it. What is "disks" anyway ? I don't have that. Plus the Dell article states we will be notified if the BIOS needs updating. Nope, doesn't happen. Anyway, most of those issues I need to chase up with Dell; just checking here that mkusb is valid to use for updating the BIOS.

- I have never used mkusb to update the BIOS, so I cannot give you any guarantee, but it can to do what Disks can do (to create a partition with a FAT32 file system) as described in Dell's link.

- Disks alias `gnome-disks`is a tool to do several tasks with mass storage devices (disks, drives), and it is bundled with Ubuntu and several (maybe all) Ubuntu community flavours.