Persistent LMDE with Startup Disk Creator on pendrive

[fiik1]

Hi to all.

I have a 16 GB Sandisk Cruzer Blade USB drive. My aim is to create a portable LMDE operating system. Both for the challenge and to spread the word amongst my friends. Just today, I've converted another mate with an old Dell with stand alone LM9 LTS.

On another thread, I recieved a lot of help trying to use GRUB with no real progress other than finding out that needed someone with a lot more knowledge.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=64335

Please bear with me for the long description of what I have done so far. I'm trying to avoid us doing things twice.

I have used Startup Disk Creator in LM9 to set up my usb. There is still a problem with persistence.

Creator uses casper and syslinux to boot. In setup, it gives the option of persistence up to 4 GB file or discard.

The progress window indicates it creates a persistence file. Everything seems to go smoothly to completion and reboot.
The boot-up avoids the usual live dvd menu and goes all the way to the live desktop with install Mint shortcut. Change the keyboard to USA Colemak with CapsLock an additional backspace. Reboot the PC, no remove drive and enter request on shutdown, and back to live desktop. No Persistence. Reboot.
I go to users and groups and create my own user desktop. Logout of Mint and into my desktop. Change keyboard settings and go to reboot. It wouldn't let me. Needed a root password. Back to the forums to change that.

I'll post this to gain some interest amongst you as I slowly type out some more.

[fiik1]

More research tells me that the program creates a seperate ext2 partition labelled casper-rw to generate persistence. Some sites have called it casper.rw .

Run GParted. dev/sdd- Sandisk 16GB- has a single FAT32 Partition sdd1. No casper-rw ext2 partition. Amongst other things I created the casper-rw and casper.rw partitions to help it along. No effect.

I removed the pendrive, and booted up normally. Re-inserted the pendrive to determine the included files.
First level-

casper directory No casper files inside.
syslinux directory No casper files inside.
ldlinux.sys
md5sum.txt
casper-rw Properties:- Type:- Unknown (application/octet-stream)
Size :- 3 GB (3184525312 bytes) The size I set on sliding scale at set-up.
Location:- /media/0C41-774A

And, yet again, I cry for help!

[seeley]

Hi!
Here is my HOWTO: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 38#p360138
seeley

[fiik1]

I have it working by a simple install via a PC with LM9 LTS base.
Installed with a single ext3 partition. Confirm persistence.

The problem now is that it will only boot this computer. I know I've seen this on the forums somewhere. I'll go looking.

[fiik1]

GParted-Manage Flags-mark boot.
All working. Broke the grub on the LM9 computer, upgrading it to LMDE.

It's all good, thanks.

[sgosnell]

A liveUSB with persistence isn't the best way to go, IMO. I would use a 1GB USB drive, or SD card, using unetbootin to burn the .iso to it, and use that to do a full install to the 16GB drive. I've done this many times, and it's easy to do. The liveUSB with persistence is just for trying out the OS for a short time. Doing a full install will let you run the OS indefinitely.

[fiik1]

I have already done as you suggested and got it working.

2 GB Sandisk for live usb, the LMDE iso requires 986 MB - about 17 MB more than the Verbatim 1 GB USB drive has available. Did this on a different PC (to the one I normally use to avoid any FU's to essential data), running LM9 LTS.

Tested Okay for working system. Then ran update to get new GRUB. All good.

Booted up this (P4 3.4 GHz Dual Core) and the USB drive was ignored. Went into GParted - Manage Flags and flagged for boot.

Works on 4 different PC's I have available for test.

Now I can get back to what got me started on this journey up the learning curve.

I am trying to use an old laptop with AMD Athlon(tm) XP-M 1800+ MHz cpu and 1 GB ram. The hdd has failed, so I figured working it from a USB drive would be cool. It boots up with an LMDE live USB or live DVD to desktop. The
boot order uses USB RMD-FDD first. The other options are USB FDD, USB CDROM, USB HDD, and USB RMD-HDD, none of which work.

When I insert the working USB LMDE stick in and hit the power the initial screen comes up, recognises the cd drive and locks - not even access to the BIOS. I'll get the old, old PC with XP going and see if I can flash it from the 1 GB flash drive.