If I put debian10 on a micro-sd card that is FAT formatted, using Etcher, will the OS on the sd boot?

bvv · 09-17-2019, 03:05 PM

If I put debian10 on a micro-sd card that is FAT formatted, using Etcher, will the Debian OS on the sd boot from my NON-windows computer?

I read in one of the links that it didn't matter what the sd was formatted to before using etcher because etcher would overwrite the formatting. However, I am doing everything on a windows OS.

Will the sd-card boot or do I need to first format the sd-card to ext4?

Using windows I am not able to format to ext4. Hopefully, I don't need to.

jefro · 09-17-2019, 03:35 PM

If may be possible. The problem usually that micro-sd cards are not always attached as a bootable media or the sd to pc device isn't fully supported in bios as a boot media.

Using Etcher for windows will allow you to do what it can do. Not all distro's are hybrid. Not all distro's know how to be placed on a sd card. There are other live to programs like rufus.

Guess you could boot to a live cd or dvd to use dd command or use dd4win or such.

bvv · 09-17-2019, 03:42 PM

Whenever I do this in linux, the OS always boots from the sd card. But I always format the sd card to ext4 first. But I am not able to using this windows computer because my friend will not allow me to download a 3rd party software to format it to ext4.

michaelk · 09-17-2019, 04:17 PM

I don't know either. However, since Etcher writes byte for byte directly to the USB drive it should work. The debian FAQs suggest using win32imager but it also writes byte for byte. In this case and as posted it does not matter what filesystem type is currently on the drive since it will be overwritten anyway.

Some Windows utilities like unetbootin extract the files to a FAT32 drive and use syslinux to create a bootable device. The debian FAQs do not suggest using unetbootin.