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Back to Debian

Here you can discuss every aspect of Debian. Note: not for support requests!
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Gnigma
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Back to Debian

#1 Post by Gnigma »

After using Fedora for about a year, at the suggestion of my IT employed stepson, I'm back to Debian. I've used Deb for years. Fedora was as stable as anything I've seen, but I could never get it to install the drivers for my Pantum printer, and there were other annoying little bits here and there--- it's not as restrictive as OpenSUSE, nor as bloated as the Ubuntu based distros, but I just always felt as if someone else had control of part of my system. By the way, something I've noticed is that some distros, the ones which have a paid-for version, If you load their installer onto a thumb drive, you can never remove it, format it, or initialize it again. (I don't know about the ones with a physical switch, but I've made several thumb drives unusable except to load Pop! OS, Fedora, and OpenSuse.) It's really annoying when you put a net install iso of less than 2 GB on a 64 GB drive, and then can't use it--- you might be able to use the rest of it if it'll let you use the open space, IDK. Anyway, I'm back with Debian, and Deb 11 looks cool!

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sunrat
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Re: Back to Debian

#2 Post by sunrat »

Gnigma wrote: 2022-05-20 17:34 If you load their installer onto a thumb drive, you can never remove it, format it, or initialize it again.
That sounds strange. I've reformatted USB keys dozens of times after using as installer.
First check how the device is recognised with lsblk .That will show it as sdX where X is a letter, eg. sdd
Then (for FAT32 format):

Code: Select all

 mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdX   #(upper case "i")
or with disk LABEL:

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mkfs.vfat -I /dev/sdX  -n "LABEL"
LABEL can be whatever you choose (apart from illegal characters) but is limited to 11 characters for fat32. Of course you can format it to whatever file system you want, ntfs, exfat etc., or ext* if only used in Linux.

Welcome back to Debian btw! :wink: 8)
“ computer users can be divided into 2 categories:
Those who have lost data
...and those who have not lost data YET ”
Remember to BACKUP!

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canci
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Re: Back to Debian

#3 Post by canci »

Great to see you're enjoying Debian.

I've found that a lot of distros just don't use normal numbered partitions (e.g. sda1, sda2 etc), but rather have one sda or whatever. And some of the more automatic disk formaters or boot image creators were confused by that.
So I rather just do what sunrat suggested, or when I'm really lazy, I just use gparted.
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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: Back to Debian

#4 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

Gnigma wrote: 2022-05-20 17:34If you load their installer onto a thumb drive, you can never remove it, format it, or initialize it again
Remove the ISO magic string:

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# wipefs --all --force --backup /dev/sdX
Replace X with the drive letter assigned to the device. If you **** up and use the wrong letter the string can be restored to the relevant device by following the advice in the EXAMPLES section of the wipefs man page.
deadbang

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wizard10000
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Re: Back to Debian

#5 Post by wizard10000 »

ISO9660 filesystems don't have a partition table and hybrid .iso use a proprietary partition table that's not understood by *most* disk management tools.

I've had good luck just blowing away the boot sector with dd and repartitioning the thumb drive with gparted.

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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=1
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Re: Back to Debian

#6 Post by sunrat »

The format command I posted above creates a filesystem on the device without a partition, aka "superfloppy" mode.
“ computer users can be divided into 2 categories:
Those who have lost data
...and those who have not lost data YET ”
Remember to BACKUP!

Gnigma
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Re: Back to Debian

#7 Post by Gnigma »

Actually, fooling around with the GUI this morning, I discovered that I can overwrite the other iso with a Debian Iso, and then Debian can reformat it. It was just an annoying little peculiarity that I noticed while trying to find a thumb drive to put the Debian iso on. And, actually, Debian feels familiar--- no weirdness like other distros I've experimented with.

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