MintStick as USB Image Writer completely broken in Linux Mint 16 KDE and Linux Mint 17 KDE

[linuxmint]

MintStick as USB Image Writer completely broken in Linux Mint 16 KDE and Linux Mint 17 KDE

[mauromol]

Please also see https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1313299

[frgaudet]

mintstick doesn't set the boot flag. Neither KDE partition manager in the exemple you sent. Nevertheless, we could add that flag, easy to fix.

[mauromol]

I don't think it's just a problem with the boot flag (although I would expect it to set it, since I thought the main use case here were the ability to write bootable CD/DVD images to an USB stick). In fact, with my pendrive after writing an image to it I get a completely "empty" and/or inaccessible stick. I have to wipe it (recreate the partition table and partitions from scratch) to use it again.
Maybe this has to do with Launchpad Bug #1313299 I mentioned in the second comment.

[frgaudet]

Well... mintstick comes with 2 differents options. Format USB stick and Burn ISO image.

1/ Format USB stick is used to place there your documents or whatever. Until now, 'Format USB stick' didn't set the boot flag parameter. As far as I know, Unetbootin tool don't format the stick but copy an ISO content and add its own option in isolinux. Is unetbootin set the boot flag parameter ? I don't know. That maybe explain your issue.

2/ Burn ISO image works differently than Unetbootin. It simply copy byte after byte an ISO to the stick, no matter what it is inside. Everything is overwritten : partition table, data..etc.... Meaning it will boot, if and only if the ISO is bootable itself.

Now, about your bug in launchpad. The only difference between a mintstik format and KDE partition manager format is the space before the first partition (2048 sectors versus 63), and the fact that mintstick doesn't align correctly the end of the partition, but that's harmless, since there no partition after. The thing is, with the information you provide, I can't figure out the issue.

Given your stick, if you just burn a bootable ISO inside , does it boot ? Is the ISO bootable itself ? We can talk about that in IRC if you prefer, it will be faster that here.

[mauromol]

Exactly, I have two issues. I mentioned both here because I thought they could be related.

1. if I format a USB stick, I do not expect mintStick to set the boot flag (maybe the user could be asked for this in the format stick window). Nevertheless, the problem with my USB stick is that if I format it in this way the resulting stick is not usable (completely inaccessible, I can't even see a partition table with any fdisk or such). Honestly, I didn't try this use case with Linux Mint 17, but I did with Linux Mint 16.

2. if I burn an ISO mage, I still get an unusable stick. No contents in it, of course it doesn't boot either. I tried many times with a Linux Mint ISO image or various Ubuntu images.. In the end, I always had to use Unetbootin or the Ubuntu usb-creator-kde.

I would meet you in IRC with pleasure, the problem is that it's hard for me to take an appointment, I usually write here when I have 2 minutes free. Anyway, tell me if you wish me to try to do anything that will help you to understand better what is going on my system.

[xenopeek]

Thanks for contributing to mintstick. Considering there have been no updates to this issue since late 2014 I assume it's no longer affecting users so I'll close it.

If the issue happens again, please test against the latest mintstick version, go through troubleshooting (see our guide) and create a new issue if the responsible component proves to be mintstick.

[mauromol]

Sorry, I don't want to be sharp, but by virtue of this issue not being updated since late 2014, people simply stopped to use mintstick. At least this is my case.