If you tell enough stories, perhaps the moral will show up.

2008-10-06

Boot (If You Can) and Nuke.

Endless problems trying to get DBAN to boot reliably off a USB stick for Desktop to erase a bunch of machines with.

The Windows installer never quite managed to make the stick bootable and there isn't an installer for Linux. Eventually I booted into linux and just dd'd the floppy disk image over the raw device (/dev/sdb rather than /dev/sdb1 -- though I'd previously made sdb1 bootable) -- there are no partitions on a floppy, and that seems to boot, but not very happily.

I'd have made a real floppy, but I can't believe that many of those machines would actually manage to read a whole FD without error. What they don't have is CD readers, and I don't know the general process to make an ISO bootable on a USB stick.

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