Problem creating bootable usb thumb drives

[Qqmike]

Good! Keep us posted, as you can.

[bobbicat]

Thanks for your interest Qqmike,
I will post at the GParted forum and will report back with any news

*addition*
I reported this as a bug, it seemed more appropriate.

*further addition*
belt n braces - its in the forums too

[Qqmike]

I can relate to your experience. Having done enough crazy experiments, I have also encountered unexplainable issues like what you encountered (but not the same problem you are reporting).

However ... I'm not sure about throwing the dd method out the window. (I'm kind of a dd fan, as it sounds you are.) dd is listed as Method D, so the iso image must contain everything needed to boot and use, or they would caution you; or, this is an unknown bug.

What I would suggest is to post this at the GParted forum and ask if anyone has had the same or a similar experience; perhaps even a mod/dev might see it and respond. I've had good luck on the few occasions I've had to post there. If you happen to do so, let us know back here.

Agree that GParted is a very good tool!

Thanks for your post.

[bobbicat]

These days I use a thumb drive to install the latest version of Kubuntu. CD's, DVD's and my DVD Player have become redundant.
I also use a Gparted-live usb drive to prepare disks before installation. I have discovered that pre-formatting drives tends to smooth the flow of a Linux install.

I decided to update my version of Gparted and in doing so started to experience some anomalies that I hadn't noticed before. I downloaded the appropriate .iso and using dd, copied it across to my thumb drive.
I will spare you the agonies that I then went through, but in brief, it followed that if I corrected the errors, a recursive partition and a partition overlap, then the program and the thumb drive ceased to function. The only sure way was to start again, to repartition and re-copy the .iso ...and then, as long as it was left in its error state, it would continue to function. Arriving at this situation appears to be a result of using dd to make the thumb drive.
I'm not sure that apart from creating confusion (in the error messages that crop up) it is so important, but to my perfectionist inner self running programs that throw up error messages is like standing in a lift with someone who has a bad case of wind. I just wanted to get out.

Eventually, after spending hours looking for ways to overcome this problem, I found that a manual installation, as suggested on the Gparted web-site, instantly solved the issue and also pointed directly to dd being the cause of the messages. I simply downloaded the gparted .zip file, unzipped onto a thumb drive, ran the script to make it bootable and voila - an error free working Gparted-live thumb drive.

It was no more trouble than using dd and the end result was glitch free. I had always used dd to create my bootable thumb drives and although I'm sure it is still a viable method I will be looking at alternatives in the future.

I thought I would share this with you, though maybe you already know...?
...the instructions for setting up are at http://gparted.org/liveusb.php for those who want to follow it up. I was following Method B, the manual install for Linux.

I heartily recommend gparted-live, it is a very useful utility.