i have a 32 gigs usb drive and, given that most isos are around 2-5 gigs, it’s such a shame to see nearly 30 gigs of perfectly good free space go to waste whenever i need to use it as a bootable drive. is there any way i can burn an iso image to the usb drive while still being able to use its free space?

  • monovergent@lemmy.ml
    0·
    17 days ago

    If you don’t want Ventoy:

    Wipe the drive and partition it so the first partition is large enough for your ISO, then the second partition for your data spans the remaining space. I chose MBR over GPT so I could boot on both modern and legacy BIOS machines. Then dd your ISO to the first partition. Set the bootable flag on that partition if it isn’t already. Format the second partition with whatever filesystem you’d like.

    My Clonezilla recovery drive is set up like this, but it’s been a while so I might have forgotten something. Let me know if I did.

    • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.brOP
      0·
      17 days ago

      it didnt work sadly. all i got was a blank screen

      edit: actually i think i got it right this time, i just needed to format it as an empty partition on gparted. brb edit 2: nope. blank screen again (even though the dd’d partition got recognized by gparted this time)

      • groet@feddit.org
        0·
        16 days ago

        If it shows up in gparted correctly it sounds like you did it correctly but just to make sure, don’t dd the iso to the mounted partition, you don’t want to have a filesystem with a .iso file on it. dd directly to the device (like /Dev/sda1 or whatever). BTW you don’t need dd just use cp.