Creating a bootable Linux USB key from Haiku

Question

Note: Usually a question about Haiku would be the opposite--creating a bootable Haiku USB key from Linux or perhaps Windows--but since I have Haiku running and not Linux, I do actually mean what is in the title.

I did this (without the USB key mounted):

dd if=filename.iso of=/dev/disk/usb/1/0/raw bs=1M

And I ended up with a stick that shows up correctly in DriveSetup in the sense that the volume name was already there and the FS shows as ISO9660. It mounts fine, and shows this:

> ls -A
.disk  isolinux  live

However, if I reboot, the USB key doesn't even try to boot--no message or anything, it just boots off the HD as if the USB were not there. If I stick another Linux USB stick, that a friend gave me, in the same port, and reboot, that one comes up fine, so I know the BIOS is configured to search for USB sticks.

Update: Some places say that you can simply dd, while others say you can't. Is it that, e.g. Slackware and the distro I'm trying cannot do it, but Arch Linux somehow can? If so, are there any tools for Haiku that can help with this, since the traditional solutions involve tools for Linux or Windows?

Answer 1

The ISO has to be an isohybrid. The isohybrid tool is generally in the syslinux package or similar on linux. That tool can enable it on isos using a suitably modern isolinux version. I'm not sure about haiku.

Many modern linux ISOs are pre-isohybridized. You can usually check by eg fdisk disk.iso and seeing if it shows a partition table.

It may be easiest to download a known-isohybrid image (ie ubuntu live) to run live and create your preferred distro in the usual manner.