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·
        17 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.

    • sixty@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      17 days ago

      Wanna weigh in for whatever it’s worth.

      Was super excited when i found Ventoy. Had 2 partitions on the same flash drive, 1 for Ventoy and .isos and one for backing up various files. It was supposed to be the one to rule them all.

      When it came to actually using Ventoy to create a new Linux installation, the installation failed and the Ventoy partition became completely corrupted, rendering it unusable and the .isos were gone.

      Not sure what happened, but going with Ventoy is not really worth the hassle if I can reliably flash a usb drive that I know will work.

  • url@lemmy.world
    0·
    18 days ago

    Sounds like you need to create two partitions and format them with relevant filesystems

    • Auster@thebrainbin.org
      0·
      18 days ago

      Alternatively, maybe just making a new folder on the USB’s root and putting stuff in there would suffice?

      Also if the OP uses Ventoy, from my tests you can put whatever in the partition for the ISOs without interfering in Ventoy’s functionalities.

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

      i thought about doing that, but i wasnt sure if that would get recognized as a bootable device (especially on my pc which is still has a bios instead of uefi). ill test it and come back to say if it worked or not