Media writer on an 8GB USB stick.
Computer: Old amd 64 processor. 4GB Memory. 300 GB hard drive
Want to install Fedora 42 on my computer. Downloaded Fedora Media Writer from the top tag and had a couple of issues with it. The first boot from the usb stick resulted in the following
*) After quite some time, it brought up the screen to select what to install.
I selected the workstation option and after a while resulted in the patchwork screen.
The Second attempt just ended up in a "Media check is complete. Result is: FAIL!
The usb stick is now bricked.
I couldnt even get Windows to reformat the usb stick. I got an error that the first partition where the 4+ GB file was placed was a “locked” partition.
Any suggestions on how to proceed?
How to unbrick the usb stick?
Also, I dont need a “live” boot. I just want to install directly to the hard drive.
For that, you can download the “Everything Installer” from https://alt.fedoraproject.org/ - that’s a smaller download and doesn’t include the live boot.
In Windows you could try these steps to remove the locked partition from the USB stick.
Regarding the media check failure, you could follow this guide and see if that sheds light on the problem. Although there’s a good chance the USB stick had a pre-existing hardware problem, and it would be worth trying another one.
I’m afraid USB storage devices fail quite often, so this isn’t really terribly surprising. Probably it would have failed regardless of which software you used to write the image.
Do you mean that the usb stick shows up as smaller than the 8gib?
If so you can run media writer again and it has an option to restore the stick to its full size.
Thanks for these suggestions.
I tried netinstaller as you suggested (on a different usb stick) and now booting up with this usb drive and image I just get the blank screen. I tried rebooting a couple of times to the same blank screen. Unfortunately.
Im not worried about the usb flash drive really, I just dont want to keep ruining all my usb flash drives while trying to do a fresh install of f42. I wish the install would just fail and not ruin the flash drive.
No, I should have been clearer. The usb flash drive now has 3 partitions on it:
first partion space seems to be the fedora iso.
small unused partition.
third partition has the remining of the 8 GB space.
Since this flash drive had errors, I wanted to reformat it in windows. But kept getting a “Locked Partition” error from windows 10 Diskmanager utility so I couldnt modify it at all.
You first need to run media writer again to unlock the USB drive.
There was a warning when you first wrote to the USB stick with Media Writer that you would need to do this.
Thanks! those steps were able to recover the flash drive back to normal!
Now I can trying either the netinstall or the full iso install again.
Update: While the list of commands made the usb flash drive usable, only 6.6 MB of the 8GB were made usable. Ouch. So I cant use this usb drive for even attempting to do the netinstall.
Odd thing is that diskpart shows 8GB of total space.
However, diskmanager shows 6.6 MB of total space!
Upon closer inspection, the usb flash drive isnt fine. I commented above.
diskpart shows 7000MB but once in file explorer and diskmanager, only 6.6MB is shown as total space. Oh well. Separate issue I guess.
Now back to figuring out how to get F42 with a clean install.
No. Im saying total space is only 6.6 MB not 6.6 GB. Most of the space has been lost and I’m trying to recover that space so I can proceed with the F42 install.
That doesn’t sound like a problem. It’s probably just the size of the boot partition?
If you’re finished using the USB device for the installer image and are ready to store files on it again, then you can reformat the USB device: create a partition table, then create one FAT32 partition to fill the entire space. In Fedora itself, the easiest way to do this is to use GNOME Disks.
