Koha Live CD to USB

We had no problem creating a bootable live USB stick from the Koha Live CD using the ubuntu make bootable usb disk option but a lot of the students were unable to get their bootable usb stick to boot - 'boot error' was the result.

I use standard no frills kingston datatraveller usb sticks as i have found them a reliable cross-platform device. It may be possible that some usb sticks are not bootable?

We decide to remove the ubuntu usb install as a factor - and to use unetbootin to create the bootable usb from the koha live CD ISO image.

We downland unetbootin-windows-442.exe and run it. Nice that it does not have to be installed.

1. Select Diskimage radio button and browse for the koha live cd ISO on S:
2. Select the USB Drive (F:)
3. Click OK

It extracts the files from the iso and installs the bootloader. Very fast. I wonder if it worked on the test stick. We put the stick in another machine and reboot. No joy - didn't think so as this stick had the same behavior as the others that failed, when trying to re-format in windows it returned error of 'you do not have administrative rights, disk cannot be formatted'. This stick had been formatted as FAT on an osx machine like the other one that did not work.

We will wipe this stick and try unetbootin with some other ones.

Update: The key symptom of sticks that do not work is that when you put the stick in a Windows pc and try to format it, it says 'you do not have administrative rights....'. I am wondering if sticks formatted under Ubuntu or OSX have this issue. I can't remember if if formatted the 2 working sticks.

As a test we insert a non-working stick and format it as FAT under ubuntu. Once formatted we put it in a windows machine and try to format it again...

YES - that is the problem, if the stick is formatted on the Ubuntu box it then cannot be formatted on a windows box. And if it is formatted on Ubuntu it returns a boot error.

Ok - we go into the disk utility and delete the partition. Now we plug the stick into a windows machine. It is not formatted but we still get 'you do not have sufficient rights to perform this operation'

Back to Ubuntu - we create a FAT partition and format it as FAT but do not check the bootable checkbox. We run the USB startup disk creator and select the USB device (/dev/sdb1) and reserve 1gig for a persistence file. No joy - it must be bootable and cannot be formatted on Ubuntu.

The current theory is that sticks not formatted on Ubuntu should work...and sticks formatted on ubuntu may work on other machines but not in the GRC...arrgh

Update - confirmed. We created a kingston stick in the GRC using format and install to USB and it did not boot the GRC computer but booted my laptop fine. We don't have a solution to the problem except to remove the format part of the instructions and to see if that works. This means we need some more sticks...