Thanks everyone — this was a great idea, great implementation, and it is paying off. For example:
If you’ve never tried running a Linux operating system, this is a great time to dip your toes in the water. Total novices might want to try Fedora 25 because of the ease of writing the image to a USB stick.
— http://www.pcworld.com/article/3150765/linux/4-easy-linux-projects-for-newbi...
On Thu, 2016-12-22 at 10:31 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Thanks everyone — this was a great idea, great implementation, and it is paying off. For example:
If you’ve never tried running a Linux operating system, this is a great time to dip your toes in the water. Total novices might want to try Fedora 25 because of the ease of writing the image to a USB stick.
— http://www.pcworld.com/article/3150765/linux/4-easy-linux-projects-for-newbies-and-intermediate-users.html
Yep, I've noticed almost every article about F25 being positive about FMW too. Great work by everyone involved!
On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, 2016-12-22 at 10:31 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Thanks everyone — this was a great idea, great implementation, and it is paying off. For example:
If you’ve never tried running a Linux operating system, this is a great time to dip your toes in the water. Total novices might want to try Fedora 25 because of the ease of writing the image to a USB stick.
— http://www.pcworld.com/article/3150765/linux/4-easy-linux-projects-for-newbies-and-intermediate-users.htmlYep, I've noticed almost every article about F25 being positive about FMW too. Great work by everyone involved!
It is a testimony to simplicity.
I am wondering if there's a bit of a gotcha lurking however. The wonky partition structure used by images once applied to a USB stick can make them behave very strangely, and in a way a reformat or even repartitioning won't fix. FMW has an option to wipe all of the signatures that cause this and restore normal function, but it's not a feature advertised at media creation time. You'd only know about the feature upon inserting an already imaged stick.
On Thu, Dec 22, 2016 at 12:45 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Thu, 2016-12-22 at 12:23 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
The wonky partition structure used by images once applied to a USB stick can make them behave very strangely, and in a way a reformat or even repartitioning won't fix.
Really? How so?
The ISO contains three partitions maps that are all mutually incompatible from an OS standpoint, but manage to very selectively trick each firmware we support. The experience is different on each platform, and how aggressively each reformat tool wipes the first ~32K of the stick if at all.
Example on macOS (current)
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_2Asp8DGjJ9ZllUTXM0ZDBveEk
It's an 8G stick, but there are three partitions totally less than 20M. Formatting any of the partitions will get me no where; and I can't even add partitions in the partition UI (oops). What I have to do is click on the stick itself, not any of its volumes, click Erase, and give it a new partition map. Plus it defaults to legacy Apple Partition Map because we're using a fragment of APM to trick certain Mac firmwares into booting in EFI mode from USB sticks.
What's going on is the ISO 9660 image is not on a partition (it's not meant to be combined with partitioning of any kind). It's basically a hidden payload. The MBR map is there to boot BIOS computers, APM for some Macs, and GPT for UEFI computers.
The other thing is ISO 9660 since it's an optical format specifies 2048 byte sectors and I guess this causes confusion elsewhere (I'm handwaving on this one because I can't remember exactly, maybe mbriza will chime in) since USB sticks are 512 byte sectors; and they end up appearing much larger than they really are or something?
Meanwhile in GNOME, it sees this same stick rather differently because it ignores the APM and GPT, preferring to honor the MBR.
I don't know off hand what sees all three partition maps and knows to wipe all three signatures, so there could even be really weird latent after effects even if something successfully reformats the stick.
Chris Murphy
On Thu, 22 Dec 2016 22:25:35 +0100, Chris Murphy lists@colorremedies.com wrote:
The other thing is ISO 9660 since it's an optical format specifies 2048 byte sectors and I guess this causes confusion elsewhere (I'm handwaving on this one because I can't remember exactly, maybe mbriza will chime in) since USB sticks are 512 byte sectors; and they end up appearing much larger than they really are or something?
You're right, this is problematic especially in Linux tools like GParted - it will try to format the drive to 4x larger than it actually is. While this may not be the source of the problems GParted has with USB sticks containing dd'd Fedora ISOs, the tool is just not able to format them correctly.
The safest bet when restoring the drives manually is to use your platform's variant of writing the partition table with zeros and reinsert the drive. FMW does handle this without the need to reinsert the drive though (also you're right this should be advertised a bit better when you're writing the iso - I actually had the message in there but I, uh, sort of got rid of it and it never occured to me it's missing).
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