I have created two live USBs in two separate pendrives:
- The first one has an ISO image of Debian.
- The second one has an ISO image of Fedora.
Equal conditions
- My laptop: Aspire V11 Touch (aka V3 112P P2E7)
- My boot manager: InsydeH2O Setup Utility Rev 5.0
- Commands to create the live-USB:
- create gtp partition table
- format to fat32 filesystem
dd if=path-to-iso-source of=/dev/sdX
This seems to be in line with what I consulted in the Debian documentation, namely 3.6.3. Systems with UEFI firmware and 4.3. Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting.
Aim
To bootstrap the laptop with a live version of Debian or Fedora by using the respective pendrive.
Issue description
- The boot loader does not even recognize that a stick is plugged into the port with the Debian image. Hence no booting from it.
- With Fedora, no problem.
Settings proven not to be relevant
- UEFI/Legacy mode
- Secure/Not Secure boot
Although the suggestion to downgrade these options seems to be almost commonplace, my issue is independent of those.
- Fedora works well with the standard settings (UEFI + Secure Mode)
- Debian does not work with any combination allowed by the boot loader.
See this post on superuser for early explorations of this problem.
First diagnosis
Therefore I came to the conclusion that the problem resides in the ISO images. Below I compare their directory trees of them. I suspect that the Debian image lacks an EFI directory that Fedora has.
Working: Fedora-Live-Workstation-x86_64-23-10.iso
Source here
Directory tree:
<path to USB>
├── EFI
│ └── BOOT
├── isolinux
└── LiveOS
Not working: debian-live-8.2.0-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso
Source here
Directory tree:
<path to USB>
├── debian -> .
├── dists
│ ├── jessie
│ ├── stable -> jessie
│ ├── testing -> jessie
│ └── unstable -> jessie
├── install
│ └── gtk
├── isolinux
├── live
├── pool
│ └── main
└── tools
Questions
Was my attempt ill-fated because I picked an inappropriate Debian ISO image from the repository? If so, could you please point me in the direction of guidelines on which one to choose?
How can I create a Debian ISO image that has the same capabilities as the Fedora one?
This problem will be sorted out when the boot loader
- recognizes that a memory stick is in place;
- accepts booting from that memory stick.
Thanks for helping out.
