I want to copy the latest Ubuntu release installer ISO to a usb key.
I may be wrong but from my knowledge, on an uefi machine it is not necessary to have boot in MBR, the EFI folder suffices to boot the installer. So why not simply copy the .iso content as files on a GPT fat32 usb stick ? This solution works for Windows and MacOS (I tried both) and avoids to "burn" to the usb stick, as it is prone to damage the usb stick, and also erases its content.
I can without issue extract and copy the files from the .iso to a folder but it fails for some symbolic or hard link files when copying to the usb stick.
So I wonder if there is still a simple solution for uefi machines to get a bootable Ubuntu installer on a key without writing image using unetbootin, dd,.. and without erasing what may already be on the stick ?
While it is straightforward for Windows and MacOS (simply copying content of .iso installer(s) to usb partition(s)), it seems there is no simple solution to get an UEFI-only live for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, as the ISO contains 3 symlinks and these files cannot be copied to a fat32 partition. Doing so will result to a usb key that will boot but fail to completely load the system and lead to initram shell because of the missing links.
To allow to get an uefi-only working usb live for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS by simply copying files from the ISO, we would need a different ISO distribution designed to work without symlinks.
EDIT : It appears that the missing symlinks are not necessary for the live/installer to work. So simply copying files to a fat32 partition is sufficient to have an UEFI-only bootable and working Ubuntu 18.04 live installer. MBR or GPT partitioning has no importance (for UEFI machine), but the latter allows to add many more (primary) partitions so I would recommend it. If it however does not work on a UEFI machine, this should be for other reasons specific to hardware/software setup, like old worn hardware, corruption or whatever.
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