usually i use tuxboot to create clonezilla_live-usb - now, there is several sites claining etcher to be a good alternative to it, especially when on linux.
so i gave latest balenaEtcher-1.5.49-x64.AppImage a try and while creating the live-usb stick (mbr, fat32) was done quickly, booting itself turned out to be problematic on my uefi laptop (secure + fastboot off). it is not recognized in the laptops uefi boot menu at all?
on an older bios laptop instead, this stick boots just fine!
so i went on and compared my old tuxboot stick with the etcher clonezilla stick and it turns out that 2 files are missing on the latter one:
ldlinux.c32 119,4kb
sha256: 5cef9ad0d0ca04097262241686c6c3a7306ab9b9cdf24b9d4ee3b16af01a5af2
ldlinux.sys 68kb
sha256: 20d012eaca2b6e2673e234ec5ee84cecf1f7f19116e913ad3bdd2ab7f1d2ccc4
the tuxboot stick also fails to boot correctly when these 2 files are not present.
here is my question:
why is these 2 files so crucial for my uefi laptop and will etcher support âcreatingâ them when processing the clonezilla iso in the future?
Hi,
First of, ldlinux.sys is the name of the bootloader file used in SYSLINUX and ISOLINUX (used for booting Linux off of FAT32 and ISO9660 filesystems, respectively). It is loaded into memory by the BIOS on bootup. The loader then parses the configuration file (syslinux.cfg or isolinux.cfg) to know which kernel to launch, along with parameters to be passed to it (where ldlinux.c32 is ldlinux.sysâs checksum). Newer uefi systems default to only work with syslinux and isolinux compatible bootloader, but what you could do is find an option called âLegacy bootâ and enable it, that way you should be able to boot the stick without needing the ldlinux bootloader file on newer UEFI systems.
Now about etcher creating not these files, one thing you need to understand about etcher is that it does not alter the image in any way, it simply burns it to disk and verifies the write, that is all. It rely on the user to configure the image appropriately it before or after the write.
Kind regards,
Theodor
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hi theodor,
thanks for your reply.
i did a little further investigation on this matter and rufus seems to download ldlinux extra files when necessary and copies them to root.
do you think a similar approach could be realized with etcher, as well?
creating clonezilla, gparted etc live-usb-media for uefi based systems with the help of etcher would be awesome!
Hi,
We currently have no plans to do so in the short term, but we do have an issue open here about Windows ISO images, so weâll use that as a reference to update people that are interested.
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