SimpleDiskImager VS unetbootin

Rufus is great for writing Windows ISOs to thumb drives. Sometimes it tries to be too smart though. In particular I had trouble writing a SmartOS disk image successfully.

I tried writing something[1] that would be a little smarter than Win32 Disk Imager. That is, it will adjust EFI partition labeling. Otherwise it will just write the image. After some experimentation that is what was needed to get a SmartOS disk image to boot on my old laptop.

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but you can’t use something like dd to write invalid disk partitioning data and expect it to boot. EFI expects there to be a header at the beginning and end of the disk. Furthermore, I can’t try to “optimize” my disk image writer by skipping zeroed sectors and expect everything to work out fine. Without knowledge of the file system format, leaving sectors uncleared causes all kinds of fun data corruption.

[1]: https://github.com/AustinWise/SimpleDiskImager

format your USB drive and then you can retry with your software again, or you can try with a piece of software I know works successfully. https://unetbootin.github.io/

Linux on a USB large enough to hold your files. Linux does not care what OS made the file. You mat be able to Boot from the USB. Access the BIOS and try it. UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities. https://unetbootin.github.io/

I think UNetbootin could create a bootable installer directly from your current drive.

This is what you want. Bootcamp is the old way to do it. You want to use This for making a usb

use rufus or unetbootin to make setup the drive

You want to test out? Get a live image. You can put it on a bootable flash drive, too (e.g., unetbootin). Changes to the computer then require your explicit consent. (If the Ubuntu partition is encrypted, you might not access the data from an other Linux except with the credentials, though.)

I have sometimes had problems with ubuntus and mints image writer. I have found the dd method to be more effective. Since the dd command has the potential to be dangerous you really want to make sure that the usb destination location is correct. dd will write over any drive you tell it to indiscriminately! If the dd option is not something you feel comfortable with there are other options as there are other live usb image writers out there for linux. I have used and liked unetbootin