i have a 32 gigs usb drive and, given that most isos are around 2-5 gigs, it’s such a shame to see nearly 30 gigs of perfectly good free space go to waste whenever i need to use it as a bootable drive. is there any way i can burn an iso image to the usb drive while still being able to use its free space?

  • beleza pura@lemmy.eco.brOP
    3·
    2 days ago

    it didnt work sadly. all i got was a blank screen

    edit: actually i think i got it right this time, i just needed to format it as an empty partition on gparted. brb edit 2: nope. blank screen again (even though the dd’d partition got recognized by gparted this time)

    • groet@feddit.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      If it shows up in gparted correctly it sounds like you did it correctly but just to make sure, don’t dd the iso to the mounted partition, you don’t want to have a filesystem with a .iso file on it. dd directly to the device (like /Dev/sda1 or whatever). BTW you don’t need dd just use cp.

    • monovergent@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 day ago

      Sorry about that, you are right. The way I originally envisioned would have disrupted the partitioning of the original ISO. Tried it myself and ran into the same issue, then finally recalled how I actually did it. See my edited comment above. Unfortunately, changing out the ISO non-destructively might be harder than I originally thought.