Windows Vista might be fun!
I had to get my work laptop reinstalled due to various undefinable problems so as I had the option to go with Vista I thought it could be, well, interesting... So far it generally works as well as I expected. We have Vista Enterprise and due to my job I and my colleagues are admins on our computers so no big problems in terms of getting things done as I like - the rest of the company have well-locked down boxes - which is good for most of them!
Anyway, today I had the need to write an iso image (750MB) to a usb stick (Kingston 1GB). I could boot into my Arch Linux partition but as there are win32 tools for accomplishing this it would be unnecessary. The iso was bz2-compressed so I first needed to extract the image.
Tools needed:
I renamed the bzip2 executable to just "bzip2.exe" and in order to not having to mess with paths I dumped the executables in the same directory as the compressed file. Then, in a command line window I ran:
About the --size option - it's probably not necessary since I'm not reading from a usb stick, just writing to it, if I understand the dd documentation.
So, I'm still not sure if this will work in the end since the point of this post is that the process of writing to the stick takes frickin' ages! It ran for a while before I started writing this post and it is still running now that I am nearing the end. It might be the stick that's slow and I can't compare with win xp right now so I can't tell if that is any better, but HELLO! Vista is sure nice in terms of looks but it is definitely no performer, judging by other people's opinions on the wild web so I think it is mainly a Vista issue... If I had rebooted into Arch I think this would have been done by now. Sigh. 300MB now, just 45 minutes or so left...
Luckily I can do other important stuff in the mean time - like post this blog entry! Yay!
I had to get my work laptop reinstalled due to various undefinable problems so as I had the option to go with Vista I thought it could be, well, interesting... So far it generally works as well as I expected. We have Vista Enterprise and due to my job I and my colleagues are admins on our computers so no big problems in terms of getting things done as I like - the rest of the company have well-locked down boxes - which is good for most of them!
Anyway, today I had the need to write an iso image (750MB) to a usb stick (Kingston 1GB). I could boot into my Arch Linux partition but as there are win32 tools for accomplishing this it would be unnecessary. The iso was bz2-compressed so I first needed to extract the image.
Tools needed:
I renamed the bzip2 executable to just "bzip2.exe" and in order to not having to mess with paths I dumped the executables in the same directory as the compressed file. Then, in a command line window I ran:
bzip2 -dI then located the image among the extracted files and moved that to where bzip2 and dd executables were and ran:
dd if=Important! In order to find out which drive to use I first runof=\\.\g: --size --progress
dd --listas writing the image to the wrong drive could cause a lot of destruction!!! Be careful!
About the --size option - it's probably not necessary since I'm not reading from a usb stick, just writing to it, if I understand the dd documentation.
So, I'm still not sure if this will work in the end since the point of this post is that the process of writing to the stick takes frickin' ages! It ran for a while before I started writing this post and it is still running now that I am nearing the end. It might be the stick that's slow and I can't compare with win xp right now so I can't tell if that is any better, but HELLO! Vista is sure nice in terms of looks but it is definitely no performer, judging by other people's opinions on the wild web so I think it is mainly a Vista issue... If I had rebooted into Arch I think this would have been done by now. Sigh. 300MB now, just 45 minutes or so left...
Luckily I can do other important stuff in the mean time - like post this blog entry! Yay!
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