Another episode in the saga of bootable USB sticks that are also usable in Windows.
In short: would it be possible to make a FAI installer boot and run from a USB disk that has a normal MBR partition table, instead of the ISOHybrid hocus-pocus? The long story: We haven't quite given up yet on the idea of a single USB stick that contains both a FAI installer and also a partition that is easily accessible and writeable under Windows. It must also be possible to add or at least expand that partition using Windows tools without breaking the ability to boot from it. Windows used to only support a single partition on removable drives, but they changed this with Win10 build 1703. It supports multiple partitions on removable USB drives, but as can be seen from my previous messages, this does not work with an ISOHybrid drive. It seems the hocus-pocus ISOHybrid uses to create a disk that is bootable from both a CD-ROM and a USB stick, is just too weird for Windows. Different versions show different behaviour, but in a recent Win10 only the EFI partition is shown and the partitioning tool wants to nuke the entire disk. GParted also doesn't know what to do with such a disk. We don't need the ability to boot from a CD-ROM drive and we don't need to support all kinds of platforms like Macs, we only care about booting a typical modern PC architecture server from USB and running a standalone FAI installer from it. Although legacy boot support with the same disk image would be nice, it would be OK if it only works with UEFI. So the question here is what it would take to run the FAI installer from a USB stick that has a regular MBR partition table. Booting a Linux system from a USB drive shouldn't be hard, I can vaguely remember having done it quite long ago. The biggest questions are probably how to do it with minimal changes, and also whether there's anything inside FAI that assumes an ISOHybrid environment and would break when booted differently. Regards, Alexander
