Writing a aptosid ISO to a USB stick, SSD card, shdc device with any Linux, MS Windows™ or Mac OS X™ Operating System

No matter what operating system you use, the follwing methods will enable you to install a aptosid ISO to a USB stick, SSD card, shdc device, (Secure Digital High Capacity card).

The aptosid ISO image is written to the device and while persist is not possible, it does allow you to have aptosid-on-a-stick.

If persist is a requirement, install-usb-gui is not subject to these limitations and therefore is the recommended option where an existing aptosid system is available, refer to USB/SSD fromiso Installation - aptosid-on-a-stick.

Prerequisites

• Ensure that the BIOS on the PC that you wish to boot with aptosid-on-a-stick/card can actually boot up USB sticks or SSD cards. This is usually any PC that has a USB 2.0 protocol and supports booting from USB/SSD.
• The USB/SSD should be recognised automatically and you should see the F4 menu option will say Hard Disk, otherwise invoke F4 >Hard Drive or add fromhd to the boot menu bootline.
• It is important to note that the following methods will overwrite and destroy any existing partition table of the targeted media. Data loss will depend on size of the aptosid-*.iso. It does not restrict the available storage as far as Linux is concerned and you may be able to regain any data left that the ISO has not wiped out, however MS Windows seems to only allow one partition. So please be safe and do not do this to your 100+- gig hardrive!

Linux    MS Windows    Mac OS X

Linux Operating Systems

Plug in your USB stick or card reader with the card you wish to write to and:

cat /path/to/aptosid-*.iso > /dev/USB_raw_device_node

or

dd if=/path/to/aptosid-*.iso of=/dev/sdf

Example:

Plug in your device run dmesg and look at the output:

sd 13:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 13:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
sdf: sdf1 sdf2
sd 13:0:0:0: [sdf] Assuming drive cache: write through
sd 13:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk

Assuming an ISO called aptosid-2009-04-moros-kde-lite-i386-200912310312.iso was downloaded, (you could rename it to aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso), then the command to run will be:

cat /home/username/aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso > /dev/sdf

or

dd if=/home/username/aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso of=/dev/sdf

The USB/SSD should be recognised automatically and you should see the F4 menu option will say Hard Disk, otherwise invoke F4 >Hard Drive or add fromhd to the boot menu bootline.

MS Windows™ Systems

This is fast and simple. Install a program called flashnul, (download page).

Note the name of 'flashnul' when you extract and install because it may show as a folder called flashnul-x.x, (for example, 'flashnul-1rc1.zip' downloaded, extracted and installed in Program Files has a folder called flashnul-1rc1, which will have a folder inside that one called flashnul-1rc1, which in turn, contains the flashnul program and associated files/folders and therefore will be used in throughout this example.)

Plug in your stick/card.

If you extracted and installed flashnul to Program Files and you are not sure of where the USB stick is mounted, study the output from 'flashnul -p' by clicking run from the menu, then typing cmd to bring up the terminal then change directories to the flashnul program folder that contains all individual files of the program, in this case:

cd C:\Program Files\flashnul-1rc1\flashnul-1rc1\
flashnul -p

The output should show something like:

Available physical drives:
0       size = 60022480896 (55 Gb))
1       size = 2003828736 (1911 Mb)

Assuming an ISO called aptosid-2009-04-moros-kde-lite-i386-200912310312.iso was downloaded, (you could rename it to aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso), cut and paste, (or copy it), to the flashnul-1rc1 folder that contains all individual files/folders of the program.

As the output example of 'flashnul -p' showed the USB Device as being mounted on 1, type in the following and hit the enter key, (administrator privileges may be required):

flashnul 1 -L aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso

MS Win7 may need the actual drive letters specified, for example the D: and c:\ drives:

flashnul D: -L c:\flash\aptosid-2010-01-kde-lite.iso

The USB/SSD should be recognised automatically and you should see the F4 menu option will say Hard Disk, otherwise invoke F4 >Hard Drive or add fromhd to the boot menu bootline.

Mac OS X™ Systems

Insert your usb device, Mac OS X should automatically mount it. In the Terminal (found in Applications > Utilities folders), run:

diskutil list

Ascertain what your usb device is called and then unmount the partitions on the device (let us assume /dev/disk1):

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Assuming an ISO called aptosid-2009-04-moros-kde-lite-i386-200912310312.iso was downloaded, to /Users/username/Downloads/, (you could rename it to aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso) and if the USB Device is designated as disk1, run:

dd if=/Users/username/Downloads/aptosid-moros-kde-lite.iso of=/dev/disk1

The USB/SSD should be recognised automatically and you should see the F4 menu option will say Hard Disk, otherwise invoke F4 >Hard Drive or add fromhd to the boot menu bootline.