Hi, BALDO wrote: > We work with BD images, but is it > possible to merge these images and put them on an external m.2?
Aha. Once in a year this question pops up. Three years ago i invested some shell programming effort and tested it with amd64 ISOs. See: https://wiki.debian.org/MergeDebianIsos Actually the script https://dev.lovelyhq.com/libburnia/libisoburn/raw/branch/master/test/merge_debian_isos is hanging between the libisoburn package and the debian-cd package. I personally think that it should get under the control of debian-cd, because it mainly cares for Debian-specific entrails of the ISOs. But the maintainer of debian-cd is reluctant to take it, because it consists of 1136 lines of shell code. So probably it will in future become a "binary" package of libisoburn. > Debian does not have a general ISO with the entire OS, To my knowledge Debian is the only distro which offers all its packages in sets of ISO images. Kudos. I can only issue guesses about the following question: > If we create > the first bootable disk on the external memory with Balena Etcher, then > manually add the packages in the pool folder can it work? I understand Balena Etcher is a plain image copier, with the same result as dd or cp (but hopefully protecting people from spoiling the system disk). So you would put the ISO onto the storage device so that it can boot. The pool folder would be put in a writable filesystem on a partition of the same storage device. After copying the ISO, you would have to add a partition to the ISO's peculiar partition table. You would have to make sure that no GPT backup table is at the end of the storage device, remaining from a previous device content. Then you need a partition editor which ignores the invalid GPT header block of the ISO. (It exists because of an old bug of virtual EFI implementation OVMF which refused to boot without this header block.) The new partition needs to be added to the MBR ("DOS") partition table. Possibly it would be easier if you let program Rufus unpack the ISO content into a bootable FAT filesystem on the storage device and copy the pool tree into that filesystem. However, filling the pool is topic of several tools https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Setup I myself would not want to do either. So i used my xorriso-fu for the merge_debian_isos script. Have a nice day :) Thomas
