Fedora Media Writer

Ask Fedora
,
1

I downloaded fedora40.iso and used Fedora Media Writer to burn it on USB.
But when boots from USB it boots so slowly and when press install Fedora does not respond to any action

2

Try a different iso writer like balena etcher it may fix the problem or it may be a hardware problem or usb stick problem.

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3

Okay, I will try. The USB works normally with other distributions. The hardware also runs Fedora 39 normally.

4

“Thank you, it works.”

5

This is worthy of filing a bug if at all possible.

6

Maybe, but I have recently used media writer for Fedora 40 Beta and it went swimmingly marvelous. Besides, why download the ISO when the media writer will get the release version you pick of Fedora’s available Editions and Silverlbue?

7

If you have a fast network connection it may not be required.
If you want to verify the iso before writing it to the USB device – download the iso
If your internet is slow or intermittent – download the iso
If you intend to also use it for installing a VM – download the iso
There are other reasons why downloading the iso then using media writer or another tool to write the iso to the usb device is preferable as well.

Once the iso has been downloaded and verified by checksum then there are no worries about the integrity of the iso and if the usb does not boot then it can be tracked back to how the device was written and not the iso itself.

OTOH when written directly to the USB while being downloaded there is never a certainty that what was downloaded was 100% intact. AFAIK there is no way to verify that since the same checksum that verifies the iso does not verify the image once written to the USB device.

1 Like
8

From the Fedora Media Writer Github site …

There are two separate checksum validation processes integrated in the Fedora Media Writer.

SHA256 hash

All Fedora images (except Atomic) have a SHA256 hash assigned when created. This hash is included in the release metadata that’s included in Fedora Media Writer and also in the releases.json file that’s provided as a part of Fedora Websites and served over HTTPS.

Fedora Media Writer then computes SHA256 hash of the ISO data being downloaded to check if the image is counterfeit or not.

It apparently does do just that

Reading can be found at MediaWriter/CRYPTOGRAPHY.md at main · FedoraQt/MediaWriter · GitHub