Hi, Kent West wrote: > > I learned that EFI boot drives need to have a GPT partition table.
No. They do not. An MBR partition of type 0xEF is well ok, too. > > discovered that the flash drive had a "mac" partition table. > > Wha-a-ah-h-h?? It has an MBR partition table with partition 2 having type 0xEF, an invalid GPT, and a useless Apple Partition Map. Pascal Hambourg wrote: > It also has Apple and GPT partition tables, but they are bogus The GPT is not valid because there is a non-"protective" MBR partition table. The APM is valid, but should be of no interest for any firmware that does not expect a HFS or HFS+ filesystem. (And there is no such filesystem in the ISO image.) Kent West wrote: > > So I ran gparted, selected the drive, and created a new "GPT" > > partition table, then repeated all my former steps, and bang! Success! Pascal Hambourg wrote: > Copying the image again overwrote the GPT partition table and anything else > you may have written to the stick. So it does not explain the success. You > may have done something wrong the first time. I agree that repeating https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#write-usb overwrites the main GPT and the protective MBR partition table. It does not overwrite the backup GPT at the end of the storage medium. Does the usable USB stick report again the Apple Partition Map ? Kent West wrote: > With my first attempt, the "cp" happened very quickly. [...] > With the second attempt, the "cp" took minutes Well, copying a CD sized image at 10 MB/s should take a bit more than a minute. "Very quickly" sounds suspicicious. But if only a few MB were copied (for what strange reason ever) there remains the riddle why it booted and probably loaded the initrd. Why does it fail when it looks for the ISO filesystem ? It would be helpful to know where exactly the installation startup failed with what message exactly. Have a nice day :) Thomas
