On Sat, 16 Dec 2023, Hendrik Boom via Dng wrote:


>* Approach 1: Get a copy of refracta, and boot from that.
>
>So I downloaded
>https://get.refracta.org/files/beowulf/refracta10.6_xfce_amd64-20211226_1733.iso
>and dd'd it to /dev/sdc1 . (Is that the way to do it?)
>before using it on the server, I decide to try booting from it on my
>laptop, just to rule out one thing that went wrong.
>
>(yes, I used the beowulf version to reduce any incompatibilities that might
>arise between different releases of Devuan, not that I expected any)
>
>I told the laptop to boot from USB, booted, and it complained it could not
>find any boot medium. Evidently not copied correctly, or wrong kind of
>boot record.
>
>(my laptop and server are both, as far as I've ever known, BIOS machines).
>
>Any further advice?

The way you used dd, you baked the ISO into the sdc1 partition... You want to dd
onto the full disk:

      dd if=refracta10.6_xfce_amd64-20211226_1733.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M status=progress

It really depends on whether the ISO comes with a bootloader. If that doesn't
work, you may want to use specialized software instead, like Ventoy.

See:
* https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/releases See:
* https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_gui.html

Cheers,
                 Ludovic