I have ubuntu 12.04 and I would like to install manjaro linux. Whenever I use the ImageWriter, my pendrive does not mount. When I check it in gparted, I see that there is no partition table. I create a partition table and then format it to a fat32 filesystem. How do I make it bootable? Thank you
1 Answer
First, unmount the pendrive. The format doesn't matter, because you're going to blow it away.
From a terminal window, issue the command:
sudo ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/*usb*This will display your USB devices attached to your computer. Note that it will not only list the hardware device (e.g. "sdd") but will also list partitions on this device (e.g. "sdd1"). What you want is the hardware device, 3 letters with no trailing digit. That is your usbdevice for the following command.
To load the iso file to your pendrive, enter the command
sudo dd if=isofilename of=usbdev bs=4M; syncwhere isofilename is the name of the Manjaro iso filename with extension, and usbdev is the 3-character USB device identified from the previous command.
This will take a bit to transfer, so be patient and check your email. When it is done, you can reboot to your pendrive, which will be a live version of Manjaro so you can check it out. If it doesn't boot to your pendrive, you'll need to reboot and enter your BIOS and reconfigure your boot sequence to put the pendrive ahead of your hard drive(s). You can also install to your hard drive from this live version, either by GUI or command line. I had problems with the GUI, but the command line interface worked fine. It can do it automatically, or you can manually configure it.
I use an LVM, and set up my logical volumes ahead of time to install it to, and did a manual installation. The installation went flawlessly, but I had a problem booting with a separate /usr mount volume, that the underlying Arch Linux had a problem with, but I was able to solve that with guidance from the Manjaro forum pages.
I also made separate logical volumes for my music, my pictures, and my data files, so I can mount them to either my Manjaro or Ubuntu distros, or any others I might install in the future. I had to add these separate volumes manually to my fstab file.
You can use the same command sequence to load any Linux distro iso file to your pendrive. I made a script file with prompts and testing to make sure I didn't mess anything up. If you dd to the wrong drive, you could mess up your working distro (you have done a backup recently, right?).
