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So I'm in an Opensuse remix called Mandriva and it has been difficult for me. Everything it does runs very well. It's the stuff that doesn't that's driving me crazy! It's not even close to Ubuntu as far as productivity is concerned, for novices of Linux like me.

Right now I'm having an issue with a command that always used to work for me in the past.

The only major difference is that, because I'm using Mandriva, I have no GUI way of reformatting a disk and modifying partitions. So I use fdisk and mkfs.vfat -n to make my USB drive bootable...
using dd if=/path/to/os.iso of=/dev/sdxx bs=4M has normally worked, but not any more. I'm betting it has something to do with the way I'm partitioning in fdsik.
They look good; after I run dd everything looks correct. It just won't boot.

There must be something that Ubuntu was doing automatically in the GUI disk manager when I edited partitions on USB drives. fdisk allows me to flag a partition as \"active\", but Linux distros shouldn't need that.

I've run different binaries that are suppose to do this for you but they seem to also leave me with a usb Ubuntu or Kubuntu disk that won't boot.

I'm starting a new school semester: Stupid time to change distros. I'm about to go over a firends house to use her Windows computer to use an ISO to USB boot application, which annoys me, because I should never have to use Windows for something like this... grrr...

Anyway, thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

you can't just dd a ISO onto a USB stick and expect it to boot; there is a few more steps than that, and you should look them up.

regardless, ponder gnome-disk-utils.

Is it an ubuntu iso made to boot from usb? There are many factors in the iso file that may not work on a usb drive. It might be a better choice to use something like this. I have that on my usb drive and can boot quite a few things from it. It uses grub for dos which is pretty simple to set up if you are familiar with grub on linux (before the crappy grub 2).

i got a cute thing called unetbootin... it's a gui app but it worked... installed a grub for me and lets me pick whatever iso I want...

I wish I could do this with out downloading stuff that does everything...

Mandriva used to be Mandrake. Mandrake bought out Connectiva and merged the name to Mandriva. They have been around many many years. In the GUI go to \"Configure your Computer\" and then to \"Manage Disks\".

Cuda68 wrote:Mandriva used to be Mandrake. Mandrake bought out Connectiva and merged the name to Mandriva. They have been around many many years. In the GUI go to "Configure your Computer" and then to "Manage Disks".

Thanks.