Installation is not aborted if installing to the non-FAT filesystem

[Krylov Ivan]

Steps to repriduce:
1) Get a USB flash drive
2) Format it (or a partition on it) to non-FAT filesystem (e.g. ext2)
3) Try to install something on it
4) Try to boot (it doesn't)

The reason is: syslinux doesn't support non-FAT filesystems. Unetbootin should either install other bootloader (extlinux in this case) or abort the installation process.

[Geza Kovacs (gezakovacs)]

The program actually does check what the filesystem of the USB drive is, and if it's ext2/3 then it should indeed install extlinux to it, and if it is neither ext2/3 or FAT16/32 then the drive shouldn't be listed. This might be an issue specific to the distribution you're attempting to install or using.

Are you using the current UNetbootin release binary (the one that ships in various distributions tends to be outdated and may predate the ext3 support)?

Also, was a file called extlinux.conf created in the root directory on the USB drive?

Also, what distribution are you using, and what iso file did you attempt to load? (I tested installation to ext3 only with the Ubuntu 9.10 desktop iso on Ubuntu 9.10)

[shnyavin (tagirbato)]

> The program actually does check what the filesystem of the USB drive is, and if it's ext2/3 then it should indeed install extlinux to it

The program assumes, that USB drive is mounted.
If it is not mounted, then the program shows the device in the list of available devices.
When user selects the drive the program shows the message with instruction to mount it.
May be in this case the check is not performed?

UNetbootin version - gentoo ebuild from stable branch - sys-boot/unetbootin-442

> what iso file did you attempt to load?
systemrescuecd-x86-1.5.8.iso