How To Create a Clonezilla Boot Drive

  1. Format USB Drive as FAT32
  2. Download the Clonezilla Live zip here or from Clonzilla’s website.
  3. Extract the zip, and copy the contents to the root of your USB drive
  4. Run the appropriate version of makeboot.  “H:\” is you usb drive.  Change if necessary.
    1. 64bit is under “H:\utils\win64\makeboot64.bat”
    2. 32bit is under “H:\utils\win32\makeboot.bat”
      1. Make sure you are running makeboot.bat from the USB drive and NOT you local C: drive.
  5. Follow the prompts and when it is finished try to boot from it.

 

Create a Bootable OS X Yosemite Thumb Drive – Simple Version

Open up disk utility and format your thumb drive as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”

Open up a terminal, and run the following command.  Change “USBdrive” to your USB Drives name.

sudo /Path/to/Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USBdrive --applicationpath /Path/to/Yosemite.app --nointeraction

Enter in your password and let it run.

Example:

sudo /Applications/Yosemite.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/OSXInstaller --applicationpath /Applications/Yosemite.app --nointeraction

How to make a bootable Windows 10 Tech Preview thumb drive

  1. Format drive as NTFS.  You can do this by opening up your drive in Windows Explorer and right clicking on your drive and clicking format.  Make sure to back up any information you have on the drive as you will lose it during the format.
  2. Mount your Windows 10 Tech Preview iso with your favorite iso mounter
  3. Next open an elevated Command Prompt by clicking the start button, typing in cmd, and hitting the Ctrl +Shift + Enter keys all at once.
  4. In the Command Prompt type “F:” (change F to your mounted Windows 10 iso drive)
  5. now run the following commands
  6. cd BOOT
  7. bootsect.exe /NT60 G:

    Change “G” to your usb drives letter

  8. Copy all of the files from your mounted Windows 10 iso to your thumb drive.
  9. Eject thumb drive.
  10. Boot up your test machine from the drive and install Windows 10 Tech Preview.

Finding a Drives Name in Linux From the Command Line

There are a few different ways to find out a drives(sdcard, usb drive, external hard drive) name.

dmesg command

One way to do it is to look at dmesg. Insert your drive and then run the command. It displays a lot of info, what we are interested in is the end which should say something about your drive.

dmesg
[ 4443.109976] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address aaaa
[ 4443.111857] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SU04G 3.69 GiB 
[ 4443.120836]  mmcblk0: p1 p2
[ 4453.045338] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): recovery complete
[ 4453.086165] EXT4-fs (mmcblk0p2): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null)
[ 4453.086184] SELinux: initialized (dev mmcblk0p2, type ext4), uses xattr

This tells us that the device is mmcblk0. The “p2” at the end is the partition number.

df Command

Another way to do it is to run the df command.
Run the below command without your drive plugged in.

df -h

it’ll return something like this

Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root   50G   12G   36G  24% /
devtmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    1.9G  600K  1.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    1.9G  1.0M  1.9G   1% /run
tmpfs                    1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                    1.9G   28K  1.9G   1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1                477M  115M  333M  26% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home   76G   45G   23G  87% /home

The above command returns all the partitions that are mounted on your computer.
Now mount your drive and run the command again, it should show your drive at the bottom.

[me@fedora ~]$ df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root   50G   12G   36G  24% /
devtmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    1.9G  600K  1.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    1.9G  1.1M  1.9G   1% /run
tmpfs                    1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                    1.9G   28K  1.9G   1% /tmp
/dev/sdb1                477M  115M  333M  26% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home   76G   45G   23G  87% /home
/dev/mmcblk0p2           3.6G  2.3G  1.1G  69% /run/media/me/fc522c75-9sws

You can see that the bottom one “/dev/mmcblk0p2 ” is the partition of the drive you just plugged in.

Using fdisk

You can also use fdisk.

sudo fdisk -l

It will return something similar to the following.

Disk /dev/mapper/fedora-home: 78.8 GiB, 191931351040 bytes, 374865920 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 3.7 GiB, 3965190144 bytes, 7744512 sectors

The bottom section is the drive “mmcblk0”.

Using lsblk

lsblk is another cool tool to list drives and partions. When run with the -p option it shows the path to the drive and partition.

Example output of what you may get with “lsblk -p”

admin@localhost:~$ lsblk -p
NAME                              MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
/dev/nvme1n1                      259:0    0   450G  0 disk  
├─/dev/nvme1n1p1                  259:1    0   499M  0 part  
├─/dev/nvme1n1p2                  259:2    0   100M  0 part  
├─/dev/nvme1n1p3                  259:3    0    16M  0 part  
└─/dev/nvme1n1p4                  259:4    0 449.3G  0 part  
/dev/nvme0n1                      259:5    0   477G  0 disk  
 ├─/dev/nvme0n1p1                  259:6    0   512M  0 part  /boot/efi
 ├─/dev/nvme0n1p2                  259:7    0   732M  0 part  /boot
 └─/dev/nvme0n1p3                  259:8    0   400G  0 part  
   └─/dev/mapper/vg-root           253:1    0   391G  0 lvm   /
   └─/dev/mapper/vg-swap_1         253:2    0   7.9G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
admin@localhost:~$ 

How to create a bootable OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) USB drive from Linux

Found this from here, since it was useful I decided to paste it here.

I saw a few guides on how to make a bootable OS X flash drive, but not many on how to do it without already having access to an OS X machine. Here are my ugly notes on creating a bootable OS X Mountain Lion (10.8)USB drive from/with Linux.

The copy of OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) I downloaded was in the form of a file named “InstallESD.dmg”. First, you’ll need to open it. You will need p7zip installed. If you try to dmg2img this file, you won’t get very far, so just extract it with 7-zip:

7z x InstallESD.dmg

The unrolled dmg file I found was 4348218934 bytes in size and had an md5sum of 8b4869920cd740414fe6b7e3f0b1be3e. Inside was another file with the same name (although it is slightly smaller) which is the actual install image. The internal dmg file (the one we really want) was 4333438336 bytes in size and had an md5sum of 68fd407bb74e4a2dd1913ce8bae80fc4. It must be converted prior to mounting, and for this you will need dmg2img installed.

cd InstallMacOSX.pkg 
dmg2img InstallESD.dmg 

The resulting img file was only 137322496 in bytes and had an md5sum of 05b5788f10f7300c457e2aed735eb83a. Now find the offset to properly mount the install partition in the resulting file.

hexdump -C InstallESD.img | grep “48 2b 00 04”
00008400  48 2b 00 04 80 00 01 00  31 30 2e 30 00 00 00 00  |H+……10.0….|

I got “00008400” which is hex for 33792 in decimal:

$echo $((0x00008400))
33792

We need to subtract 1024 from this number to find the target offset:

$echo ‘33792-1024’|bc
32768

Now make the loop device:

losetup -o 32768 /dev/loop0 /path/to/InstallMacOSX.pkg/InstallESD.img

And finally, mount it:

mount -t hfsplus /dev/loop0 /mnt/tmp/or/wherever/you/want

Next, I re-initialized an 8GB USB flash drive with an MSDOS partition table and created an HFS+ partition with gparted after installing these packages: hfsprogs hfsplus hfsutils.

Next, mount the HFS+ USB device R/W and cd to the /mount/point/of/loop/device and copy the contents of the mounted image:

tar cvf – * | tar xvf – -C /mount/point/to/hfs/usb/drive

Sync, unmount, insert USB drive into the Mac and power it on while holding down the OPTION key.