Bootable USB Keys : Which Brand ?

Home » CentOS » Bootable USB Keys : Which Brand ?
CentOS 3 Comments

Hi,

In my daily work I’m mainly using USB keys for work : one with CentOS 7, one with OpenSUSE Leap 15.1, one with Slax Live for data recovery purposes, one with Ghost4Linux and one with FreeDOS which I use for flashing the odd BIOS.

Last week I bought a set of three flashy colored USB keys in a local shop. To my surprise, none of them seem to be able to boot anything. When I write a bootable image (CentOS, OpenSUSE, whatever) to any one of the USB keys, the USB
key boot option doesn’t show up on any one of my sandbox PCs. Looks like I just learnt the hard way that some USB keys can’t be used for installation purposes.

As far as I can tell, I need a set of 8 GB keys so the biggest image, the CentOS 8 ISO, can fit. Can you recommend a no-nonsense USB key brand which I
can use to make a set of USB installation keys ?

Cheers,

Niki
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12

3 thoughts on - Bootable USB Keys : Which Brand ?

  • Nicolas Kovacs wrote:

    I think the problem is unlikely to be the flash drives themselves. However, I’ve had good luck with SanDisk Ultra.

    “Key” is a gallicism. ;-)

  • I have had no issues with the install ISO using dd from linux to copy directly to the device. Something like:

    dd if=./ of=/dev/sd bs=4M status=progress

    Where ‘of=’ is the device // make sure NOT to use a separate partition
    (so /dev/sdb and not /dev/sdb1, but the whole device when copying the install isos.

    If you are trying to do something else (create a bootable actual partition that runs from usb .. that should also be possible, but harder :)

  • Le 19/06/2020 à 17:01, Johnny Hughes a écrit :

    I’m positive that the problem here is *not* the procedure (which I’ve done countless times).

    I can take any one of my old flash drives, write bootable images on them
    (CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, whatever) and they boot fine.

    But these new no-name flash drives I just bought, they just won’t work. Anything else will. They won’t. So I’m 100 % sure this is a hardware problem.

    Niki

    —
    Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
    7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
    Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12