ISO writer

bootiso

Many of us still resort to the humble dd command when writing a distro image to USB storage because it's simple and untainted by options or system interaction. But it does have some profound problems. Worst of all is that if you get a single character wrong when declaring the device node, such as /etc/sda, dd will start overwriting your internal storage without even asking politely whether you're certain, and you'll soon be diving for Ctrl+C. A great alternative is bootiso, which doesn't present the same risk, adds loads of new features, and still runs from the command line. At its simplest, you can run it against an ISO file with the -p argument, and it will tell you about whether your ISO is hybrid and capable of being written to USB storage and whether enough USB storage has been found.

In the background, it's also running lots of integrity checks on the ISO, making sure it will boot, and has the correct MIME type, as well as whether the potential destination is correct and not a single partition. This is useful in itself, and it will even let you know which device node your storage is hanging off in case you still want to risk dd. But bootiso is even better when you want to write the image, and that's because it still uses dd. Give it your ISO as the single argument, for example, and it will join up its detection routine with its encapsulation of dd to write the image automatically, carefully asking whether you're certain, after presenting the above details on what's going to happen. It will even erase the storage first. While there's no progress indicator – just like dd – by choosing the optimal block size in the background, the transfer is often quicker than trying your luck with dd.

Project Website

https://github.com/jsamr/bootiso

Don't risk overwriting your root partition again when creating a USB stick with dd.

Encrypted comms