Hi Chaps, First post. Appologies in advance if this is the wrong list. This concerns installation of Fedora based distros from a USB key. I've read the guides that say one should run; dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/sda This works fine and I've been able to install OS using this method. However the partition table that this command creates is rather unusable for any thing other than installations. [output of fdisk -l listed below]. It seems as if the USB key is partitioned in such a way that all of the nth scsi device is used. It would be nice to be able mount the USB key in order to say, out an iso image on it. Bit of a waste of a 1GB USB key in that I do have the sapce for diskboot.img *and* an iso image. # here comes output of fdisk -l [root@acid ~]# fdisk -l Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 12 96358+ 83 Linux /dev/hda2 13 2623 20972857+ 83 Linux /dev/hda3 2624 3276 5245222+ 83 Linux /dev/hda4 3277 4864 12755610 5 Extended /dev/hda5 3277 4603 10659096 83 Linux /dev/hda6 4604 4864 2096451 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sda: 1054 MB, 1054736384 bytes 33 heads, 61 sectors/track, 1023 cylinders Units = cylinders of 2013 * 512 = 1030656 bytes This doesn't look like a partition table Probably you selected the wrong device. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 ? 1500507 1500758 253319 e4 SpeedStor Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(190, 120, 0) logical=(1500506, 0, 15) Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(544, 125, 44) logical=(1500757, 22, 47) Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda2 ? 500031 1487596 993984023 98 Unknown Partition 2 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(1010, 16, 43) logical=(500030, 27, 37) Partition 2 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(205, 205, 22) logical=(1487595, 22, 42) Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda3 ? 842835 1796589 959953209 7d Unknown Partition 3 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(252, 139, 46) logical=(842834, 15, 19) Partition 3 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(367, 195, 2) logical=(1796588, 8, 61) Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary. /dev/sda4 ? 2768 6902 4161536 0 Empty Partition 4 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(0, 10, 0) logical=(2767, 9, 41) Partition 4 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(0, 0, 0) logical=(6901, 31, 28) Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary. Partition table entries are not in disk order