I used two USB sticks for this installation. The first (/dev/sdb) contained the F33 MATE installer and the second USB stick (/dev/sdc) was the target for the installation. You can boot the same root file system in BIOS and UEFI modes.

The ISO image name is F33-MATE-x86_64-LIVE-20201215.iso

Boot the F33 installer’s live session in UEFI mode, open a terminal and become root:

$ sudo -i

List your USB devices:

# lsblk -o +TRAN | grep -i usb
sdb                8:16   1  59.6G  0 disk                        usb
sdc                8:32   1  14.9G  0 disk                        usb

If you have some partitions mounted off the target USB stick, umount them first:

# grep sdc /proc/mounts
# umount /run/media/liveuser/UUID

Erase the target USB stick’s partitions:

# sgdisk -Z /dev/sdc

Create partitions on the target USB stick:

# sgdisk \
--new 1::+256M --typecode=1:ef02 --change-name=1:'BIOS boot' \
--new 2::+256M --typecode=2:ef00 --change-name=2:'EFI System' \
--new 3::-0 --typecode=3:8300 --change-name=3:'Linux filesystem' \
/dev/sdc

Show the target USB stick’s partition table:

# fdisk -l /dev/sdc

Disklabel type: gpt

Device       Start      End  Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1     2048   526335   524288  256M BIOS boot
/dev/sdc2   526336  1050623   524288  256M EFI System
/dev/sdc3  1050624 31350750 30300127 14.4G Linux filesystem

Start the F33 installer “Install to Hard Drive”.

Select the target for the installation (/dev/sdc, 16 GiB) and use the Advanced Custom partitioner (Blivet-GUI).

Format /dev/sdc2 as EFI system partition and set its mount point to /boot/efi
Format /dev/sdc3 as ext4 and set its mount point to /

I had to disable secure boot because grub complained about the kernel’s invalid
signature when booting the USB stick after the installation.

Reboot the computer and boot the newly created USB stick in UEFI mode.

After logging in, install grub on the USB stick for BIOS mode boot:

List your USB devices:

# lsblk -o +TRAN | grep -i usb
sdb                8:32   1  14.9G  0 disk                        usb

# grub2-install --target=i386-pc --boot-directory=/boot /dev/sdb
# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Now you can also boot the USB stick on a BIOS mode computer or in qemu-system-x86_64 in BIOS mode.

To boot the USB stick in BIOS mode in Qemu:

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -machine type=q35,accel=kvm \
-enable-kvm -cpu host -smp 2 -m 2048 \
-device virtio-net,netdev=vmnic -netdev user,id=vmnic,hostfwd=tcp::5222-:22 \
-device qemu-xhci,id=xhci -device usb-tablet,bus=xhci.0 \
-vga virtio -device intel-hda -device hda-duplex \
-no-quit -drive format=raw,file=/dev/sdb

To boot the USB stick in UEFI mode in Qemu:

First install edk2-ovmf (https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/OVMF), then add these two options to the above qemu-system-x86_64 command:

-bios /usr/share/edk2/ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd \
-smbios type=0,vendor=0vendor,version=0version,date=0date,release=0.0,uefi=on \