Recently, I learned that booting from a dd’d image is actually a major hack. I don’t get it together on my own, but has something to do with no actual boot entry and partition table being created. Because of this, it’s better to use an actual media creation tool such as Rufus or balena etcher.
Found the superuser thread: https://superuser.com/a/1527373 Someone had linked it on lemmy
Thanks for the tip. Not that I plan to read up on the matter and make the next cold installation even more anxiety-inducing that it already is. Sometimes Linux would really benefit if there were One Correct Way to do things, I find. Especially something so critical as this.
There is. Just use a media creation tool, like Rufus. dd’ing onto a drive is a hack.
But how trustworthy is Rufus? This is a pretty critical operation, after all.
Assuming you have a brand-new Windows laptop in front of you, how do you go about getting Linux on it? Genuinely interested to know. Last time I had to do this, I went via Windows Powershell or whatever it’s called, and used dd. Seemed like the option involving the least untrusted parties.
Personally I think that the distros should be taking charge of this themselves, and providing the .exe installer as well as the ISO.
Same for me. Ventoy is pretty amazing and keeps most of my isos on it. Sadly, sometimes it’s not capable of doing the job, for example when I installed proxmox (based on Debian 12) this week, ventoy couldn’t do it. Apparently this is a known issue in ventoy.
But yeah, for most isos, ventoy is the way of you install OSes somewhat often, as it contains partition layouts and boot records regardless (I think).
Huh thanks for the link. I knew that just dd’ing doesn’t work for windows Isos but I didn’t know that it was the Linux distros doing the weird shenanigans this time around
Wow. I’ve been using dd for years and I’d consider myself on the more experienced end of the Linux user base. I’ll use cp from now on. Great link.
