[SOLVED] Installing Mint from USB

[littledriel]

Hi all,

I'm not new to *nix systems, rather I'm tired of Ubuntu and keep hearing great things about Mint so I decided to check it out. I'm installing it on my Lenovo X61 laptop which has no optical drives and I don't have an external. I have a 1 gig USB drive, so I grabbed the 32-bit cd iso.

Neither usb-creator-gtk nor imagewriter would write the image properly, but setting up the drive via command line appears to have created a bootable drive.

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$ sudo dd if=linuxmint-12-gnome-cd-nocodecs-32bit.iso of=/dev/sdb oflag=direct bs=1048576
620+1 records in
620+1 records out
650299392 bytes (650 MB) copied, 92.3129 s, 7.0 MB/s

But when I check fdisk it appears otherwise:

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sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf3db4fd2

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       14228   114286378+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2           14229       14593     2931862+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           14229       14593     2931831   82  Linux swap / Solaris

Disk /dev/sdb: 1001 MB, 1001390080 bytes
31 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1017 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1922 * 512 = 984064 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

I tried re-downloading the iso and checking the md5sum, that doesn't seem to be the problem. Ubuntu recognizes the USB as a Linux Mint 'drive', but when I try to boot off of it (USB booting works and is first in the BIOS) it's clear that the drive isn't set up properly.

I figured that not having a partition table was because the drive wasn't made persistent with the command line dd.

Suggestions?

[sagirfahmid3]

Use Unetbootin, it works every time for me (never failed me yet).
www.unetbootin.sourceforge.net

You can also try Pendrive Linux (also a great program)
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal- ... -as-1-2-3/

[Danko8321]

Have you tried UNetBootin? That one is more advanced than Startup Disk Creator; also, you can't just dd the iso into the drive, only the ISOs that got out from the KDE RC ahead are Hybrid (You can only dd Hybrid ISOs). Mint's Gnome edition is the Principal edition and for that it went out first than the KDE RC; that means the main edition doesn't use Hybrid ISOs and you can't just dd it; again, my advice would be, use UNetBootin.

[littledriel]

To update, I managed to get Linux Mint 10 to install using unetbootin (the most recent version available through their drop down) and then broke the install trying to upgrade to 12 through apt (unresolvable dependency issues). The first two times I tried installing LM 12 through unetbooting it didn't work, but this third time seems to be the charm.

Not sure what went differently though, all the various downloads md5sums were correct and unetbooting didn't offer any errors either. This is a little too finicky for my tastes, I'd rather good error reporting and understanding what changed, but a working upgraded laptop is better than a mess.

Thanks for the tip!!