Thought I'd take another shot at Obarun using obarun-JWM-09.01.iso and immediately ran into problems.

1. My EFI firmware doesn't detect the ext4 partition (on a USB). Annoying, but that's why I use rEFInd.
2. Using rEFInd, the boot started but quickly ended when it tried to mount /dev/disk/bylabel/obarun-JWM-2021.09.01. Hardly surprising when the maximum ext4 LABEL length is 16. A quick edit of 'loader/entries/archiso-x86_64.conf' took care of that (and matching the actual LABEL used when creating the partition).

So I now have oblive up and am about to see if I can actually install (to a BTRFS subvolume).

My question is WHY only me (and HOW).

I suspect part of the answer lies in the fact that I rarely use dd; I create and mount the target partition/subvolume, loop-mount the source iso and then sudo cp -a /mnt/source/* /mnt/target/ which gives more flexibility.

This leaves me with "HOW"... are you guys getting away with that 21 character label?
And to answer my own question....

Because the dd approach creates an iso9660 filesystem which obviously has its own rules as to LABEL length.

Yes, I screwed up the courage to try the dd approach (which I view as similar to trying to learn how to juggle using bottles of nitroglycerin).

So why does the wiki (Make a bootable image) say "Note sda3; sdb2, sdc1, etc. would be incorrect as they refer to partitions."?

I wrote to of=/dev/sdd4 (knowing it was large enough).

Powered by Obarun