Failure to dd diskboot.img to pen drive

[John Poelstra]

Phil Meyer said the following on 11/15/2007 01:43 PM Pacific Time:
> Good advice, and the OP has only a 1GB pen drive, but for those with a 
> 4GB or larger pen drive, you have better options.
> 
> First slam the broken MBR shipped on most pen drives:
> 
> unmount any mounted partitions from the device
> 
> # cat /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin >/dev/sdb
> 
> ($ rpm -qf /usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin
> syslinux-3.36-7.fc8)
> 
> Second, use fdisk to create two partitions on the tumb drive.  The first 
> one can be 12 or 13 MB depending on manufacturer.  Make it 13MB to be safe.
> 
> Now you can dd the bootdisk.img to the first partition and it will be 
> bootable.
> 
> Thirdly, format the second partition as FAT32
> 
> # mkfs -t vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb2 -n images
> 
> copy the Fedora DVD image to the second partition.
> 
> Now you have a pen drive that can do the entire install, not just the boot.
> 

Thanks for the clear and simple write-up.  I had experimented with dd-ing a DVD image to a 4G USB stick and it didn't work.

If the DVD ISO can be burned and booted from DVD media, why can't the DVD.iso be written to a USB stick booted the same way boot.iso is?

IOW: dd if=/Fedora-8-i386-DVD.iso of=/dev/sdc
where /dev/sdc is the USB stick didn't work (boot)--why is that?

John