Help me get Xubuntu on a USB drive for my lady friend

[belovedmonster]

My special lady friend is relying on me to supply her with a USB stick with Xubuntu but I'm having difficulties.

I've been following this pendrivelinux.com tutorial on putting 7.10 on a USB stick, albeit I'm trying to do with Xubuntu not Ubuntu, but I was told it wouldn't make any difference.

Along the way I came across a few problems and when I came to try out the final result all I got was a black screen saying boot error.

The problems I encountered were:

Step 12: When it says to remove the drive and insert it again I get an error message when the drive is inserted again. "Unable to mount the volume 'Ubuntu710'" When I click the details drop down it says something about "Cant read super block"

I ignored this and carried on but found another snag at step 17.

In the tutorial it says 'Ignore any "cannot create symbolic link" errors' in a big bold box so I guess its OK to get an error message here, my problem is I got a different error message it said:

"cp target: 'media/ubuntu710/' is not a directory: No such file or directory

Are these two problems contributing to my Boot error when I later try it?

If anyone else has another method of doing it then please let me know. I'd really like to get this sorted.

[grizwald]

Hi BM,

I had some success using the method described here:-

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrive ... endrive%29

Perhaps you haven't seen this URL before and I hope it works OK for you too.

Cheers,

Griz.

[belovedmonster]

I think trying to solve these problems might be a waste of time with my current pendrive after reading this comment "Note: on some usb-sticks fdisk says "Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)", in which case you may very well be out of luck trying to boot from it" That's exactly what it says about my usb stick!

But that issue aside another thing I'm coming across is the second casper partition is listed as "Linux" rather than Fat16 or something like that. I'm finding the tutorial a little hard to follow in places but I get the impression that Casper partition should not be down as "Linux". Is that right?

[Staffan]

Hi,

Maybe you already solved this problem, but here is some tips on how I did it to make it work.

I also tried some of the guides at pendrivelinux, but it often ends up with me pulling my hair out.

However, to get Xubuntu to run from an USB-stick was more tricky than I could imagine. I am using xubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso on my Live-CD. First I tried my own guide for Linux mint and made all from the Live-CD itself and got it to work - the first time.....
Then I had different results for each time I tried it out.

I've been using 2 different USB-sticks - Corsair Flash Voyager 1Gb and Data Traveler 1Gb and tried them out on 2 different computers to make sure everything works ok. Finally I got them both to work, booting on 2 different computers.

The only stable way I got it to work was to use Windows XP and format them with FAT (not FAT32) and then use the command syslinux -ma D: as described in my Howto for installing from XP. Then I booted up the Xubuntu Live-cd and used my other Howto to copy all the files, move vmlinuz,initrd.gz and moving/changing isolinux to syslinux.

I really don't know what the best advise is that I can give you, but I think you can use my guide for making it from the Live-CD. First use the command
fdisk in terminal:
d
1
d
2 .... and so on until you have deleted all partitions.
Then type n for new
Enter (first)
Enter(last)
Then type a for bootable - choose nr 1
t
06 for FAT 16
w for write
Then sudo umount /dev/sda1
mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sda1
Now when your USB-stick is formatted with FAT 16 you can follow my howto for LinuxMint, but using Xubuntu-liveCD instead.
You can make your syslinux.cfg to look like this:

default live

label live
kernel vmlinuz
append file=preseed/xubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash --

I hope this isn't messing everything up for you, but if you need I can give you a more exact description on how you can combine the 2 different methods.

//Staffan

[belovedmonster]

I'm gunna try this guide (GUI based)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=647587

[Staffan]

That should probably work too, but there is one thing I saw in that guide to be aware off. He recommend you to format with FAT32 and that will work in most cases, but on some BIOS you will get an error like "could not find kernel image: linux". If that happen you can format with FAT16 instead.

//Staffan

[belovedmonster]

Thanks for the tip.

[Fred]

Since I don't know much about using pendrives, this is probably going to be a dumb question, but here goes anyway. lol

Why can't you install to a usb pendrive the same way you do to a hard drive? Then install grub to the partition /boot is in and chain load it from another install?

It is too simple, so I know it must not work.

Thanks,

Fred

[willy_36]

I don't know if you have had your question answered yet but I was wondering the same thing. I did a full install of Mint 4.0 on a 8 GB drive(4GB could have done it too). After a little bit of tweaking I had a portable version of Linux I could carry around in my pocket and (with a little configuration) could get fancy desktop effects with every computer that could boot it. I have run into some problems though. For one it's slow. It tends to have a hard time running more than one or to apps at once. Second the more I install and tweak it the less stable it becomes. Couldn't tell you why. I also ran into some other problems that I won't mention but overall I have been very pleased with the results. I have heard rumors of long term data loss but I haven't run into that yet. If your interested in updates let me know.

willy_36