Installing proper Mint (not the LiveDVD) on a USB pendrive

[Bulgroz]

There are several threads (and guides elsewhere) on how to install a Mint LiveDVD on a bootable USB-pendrive. My idea is to do a 'real' Mint install on such a drive.

Is this feasible? Is it wise? If so, how does one go about it?

How large a partition is needed on the pendrive to holdt Mint (32-bit main edition Mint 12) and have sufficient room for supplementary software, configuration stuff etc?

[jmor8801]

I am wondering what is a 'real' Mint install' ? Whats that consist of ? Sorry if it seems a stupid question but i have never heard of that...

[Bulgroz]

By an installation I mean what results from choosing 'Install' from the LiveDVD. I expect this to differ somewhat from the LiveDVD itself. For example, AFAIK a Mint installation will be configured with drivers for the target machine's hardware (as opposed to the LiveDVD which I believe must deal with picking drivers on each boot).

Your question was not stupid, 'twas me being imprecise in the first post.

[caribriz]

I'm running a full install of Mint 12 (32-bit main edition) on a 16gb SanDisk Cruzer usb flash drive
(as opposed to making a "live usb" with persistence).

I'm quite happy with it for my purpose of experimenting with Mint 12, but if you want to
use Mint 12 long-term, a full install to a hdd would be better.
I've found it to be a bit slow sometimes, but whether that is the usb stick install or Mint 12 itself - don't know.

I installed it as you normally would doing a hard drive install, just pointing the installer to the usb stick.

I used two partitions, formatted to ext4 -
/root - 9gb (approx.) /dev/sdb1
/home - the rest /dev/sdb2
Installed Grub in sdb (no numbers)
I didn't use a swap partition.
(You don't have to have a separate /home partition. I'm just experimenting with different setups.)
Also, your drive letters may be different from the above - my internal hdd is sda.

I don't have a lot of extra software installed, but the system is fully updated (including nvidia drivers).
At the present time, the / partition is 36% (of 9gb) full and the /home partition is 2% (of 7gb) full.
I don't have a lot of documents on the flashdrive, I save to an external hdd if necessary.

I initially installed it to an 8gb Transcend JetFlash, but found it too slow so I changed to
the 16gb stick and it seems to be working better now. Also it's more "comfortable" space-wise.

I only use it with my own desktop pc, so can't say if it will easily plug & play with other pcs with different hardware configurations etc.

Here are a couple of illustrated tutorials:
http://usbtux.hostzi.com/flash_install
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1872303 - Lubuntu install to a 4gb flash drive
(the screenshots are very similar to LM - I wouldn't recommend using a 4gb stick though.)

caribriz

[usbtux]

A 8Gb flash drive is more than sufficient unless you down load other iso's or hd movies Mint 12 dvd installs to 5.7Gb according to the installer, but its actually quite a lot less. 16Gb allows for more free space. You should not make a swap partition. just making a / (root) partition is ok until you are confident in using gparted/manual install.

Remember to to apt-get clean after updating and create a ram drive for FF.

Running mint from a flash drive is slower than from a hard disk or from a liveUSB with persistence.

[AcidBurn]

I have tried this exact procedure to install Mint 12 on my 16Gb stick. It installs fine but after restart it won't boot. There's just "error: no such disk" and grub rescue prompt. Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what's the problem ?

[caribriz]

... It installs fine but after restart it won't boot. There's just "error: no such disk" and grub rescue prompt. Any idea what I'm doing wrong or what's the problem?

I personally haven't experienced this problem doing a full install to a usb flash drive.
I normally unplug my desktop's internal disks before I install on a usb flash drive from a live cd/dvd or live usb.
You don't have to, but it ensures that I install Grub to the usb stick - and not on my internal disks.

Have you installed Grub in the right drive, i.e
did you select the correct drive during install where it says "Device for boot loader installation"? It may or may not be your problem, but have a read here:
http://linux.ittoolbox.com/groups/techn ... pt-4243736
This refers to Ubuntu 9.10 where the installation screens are a bit different to Mint 12, but the same principle applies (choosing the Grub install location).

Also, is your usb stick set as 1st boot priority in bios? Someone had a problem with that here:
http://translate.google.com.au/translat ... -3527.html
from the original page: http://linux360.pl/forum/thread-3527.html

If neither is the problem, could take a look here - Grub Rescue megathread on Ubuntu forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1594052

There are many other forum threads along the lines of "error: no such partition", but I think these involve dual booting on the same hdd.

That's all I can suggest.

caribriz

[AcidBurn]

Thanks for the info caribriz I will try and see. Problem from what I suspect is with my RAID drives and linux seems to hate them too much (all my HDDs are sort of in RAID: RAID0, RAID Ready etc, except one that is an ATA drive). I've only managed to get Mint to install with mint4win and even that only on specific partitions (doesn't work on my RAID0 for example). Every other way I try it I get that "error: no such disk". I don't get why this is happening with the USB stick though ...

The only way I didn't try is to install on the ATA drive because that's used to store my Docs and important stuff and I wouldn't want to mess with that drive.

[Bulgroz]

Thanks to everyone who replied with comments and/or advice.

I went with caribriz' approach (fourth post in this thread). Caribriz' usage scenario match my own very well. So, after following the tutorial at http://usbtux.hostzi.com/flash_install, it appears that my machine does not support boot from USB. Which only goes to show.

The machine was purchased late 2006-ish, has a MSI P4M890M-L mainboard and the BIOS is up-to-date according to MSI's update tool. If anyone knows of a workaround, I'll be happy to hear of it (and so will leave this thread as unsolved for a few days).

[usbtux]

Use Plop http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html bootloader - burn it to cd then boot with that, make sure your MintUSB is plugged in before booting.
Make sure that is the only usb plugged in, then you can chose usb to boot - which will then boot mint.

[Bulgroz]

Thanks usbtux!

I made a plop 5.0.14 LiveCD, which took me to Grub, which resides on the memstick. After selecting Linux Mint 12 Standard, Grub goes:
"error: hd0 out of disk
press any key to continue"

Now, following caribriz' example the 16GB memstick was set up like this

I used two partitions, formatted to ext4 -
/root - 9gb (approx.) /dev/sdb1
/home - the rest /dev/sdb2
Installed Grub in sdb (no numbers)
I didn't use a swap partition.

- except the partition program picked /dev/sdb5 for /home. What might be the problem here? Should there be some amount of unpartitioned space left for Grub?

[Bulgroz]

Bumping as it's been a while and I'm still stuck.

As told in my latest post, I now boot from a Plop LiveCD, get the Grub menu, select Mint 12 and get an error. First, the error was "hd0 out of disk". Then I reformatted the USB drive, this time leaving ~300MiB unallocated and otherwise installed Mint as before. What changed was the error message, it is now "hd0 write error".

I've done some of the checks described in the thread: Problems Linux 12 Booting, and to me it appears that hd0 is the PC's hard drive, whereas Mint 12 and Grub are installed on the USB drive, which is hd1. Grub's cfg file seems to point correctly to the Mint install drive. So I can't tell what the problem is, except Grub appears to want access to hd0, what for I don't know. Any pointers?

[usbtux]

I presume you don't get an error without plop = booting from harddisk to the original OS

You made two partitions / (root) & /home and did you ensure that you pointed the grub loader to the usb drive.

Remake the usb again using the http://usbtux.hostzi.com/flash_install -added to this if you have already made 2 partitions you'll have to delete them (look at http://usbtux.hostzi.com/somethingelse ) ensure you make a New Partition Table and make only 1 partition / and that as above Change “Device for boot loader installation:” to your External drive.

For now though just make the / partition for simplicity & to ensure that we can get you running in mint.

[Bulgroz]

I presume you don't get an error without plop = booting from harddisk to the original OS

That's correct, without plop the machine boots from harddisk to WinXP

and did you ensure that you pointed the grub loader to the usb drive.

Yup.

Remake the usb again using the http://usbtux.hostzi.com/flash_install -added to this if you have already made 2 partitions you'll have to delete them (look at http://usbtux.hostzi.com/somethingelse ) ensure you make a New Partition Table and make only 1 partition / and that as above Change “Device for boot loader installation:” to your External drive.

I did this, allocating the entire usb capacity to the / partition. Again I get "error: hd0 write error" after selecting Mint 12 from the Grub menu. In other words, I'm still stuck (and btw don't understand why Grub would want to write to the hard dríve).

Oh, and the USB stick is a Kingston DataTraveler 112, cap. 16 GB.

[usbtux]

Can you try your usb install in another machine?

Can you try another USB stick. ?

Try another Mint flavour, LXDE and/or another iso

It does sound like its trying to write to the main hard drive

If you feel brave, you could remove the hard drive temporarily - goggle your laptop and find out for sure. Our old Toshiba - the hard drive takes less that 5 mins to remove.
On the back of the laptop there should be a plate that usually has two screws ( there may be a couple of these) under one of these is a silver/chrome block like plate that usually has one screw on the back/rear, if you undo this one you can slide the drive back and it'll come out. You could then boot from a live cd and remake the install usb. You'll still need to use the plop disk to boot the usb. boot the usb and see if it works. Then put everything back together.