Documentation regarding creation of bootable USB stick

Regarding this:

Trying to create bootable USB stick inside Haiku itself using dd command.
Every time that I manage to create it succesfully the USB stick was mounted. When it’s not mounted dd fails. This is the opposite of what the relative section describes.

I am on a recent nightly (64bit) but I remember the same behavior in the past as well.

Any explanation? Am I missing something?

The USB stick need to be unmounted but still powered on.

There are various ways to achieve this:

  • Disable automounting in Tracker. When you connect the disk, it will be powered on, but not mounted.
  • Unmount the disk from DriveSetup
  • Disable “eject when unmounting” setting in Tracker, then unmount the disk
  • Select “do not mount” when Tracker asks you what to do with the disk (but it only does so for certain filesystems)

There is one way that will indeed not work:

  • Unmount the disk from Tracker with “eject when unmounting” enabled. This will not only eject, but also power off the USB drive so you can remove it “safely”. So after doing this it is not possible to access the drive in any way anymore

Eventually we will add “write image to disk” support to DriveSetup (which will then take care of unmounting as needed), to make this process a little easier.

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Hi @PulkoMandy. Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation. Checking my current settings fully explain what happens based on your info.

I think that the relative section in the documentation could be improved maybe since I managed to create a bootable usb with a mounted disk despite the warning.