Persistent LMDE with Startup Disk Creator on pendrive

[fiik]

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.

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.

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!

[Charles4809]

I advice you to go to pendrivelinux. They have a live-usb-creator that works under Windows. It works ver well and they provide a lot of distro's that you can put on a stick. I myself use Pinguy, that is a large distro that is ubuntu based and uses a lot of things that were developed by Mint, but you can choose ligtweight distro's as well. Linux Mint Debian is supported as well. If you prefer to have a linux installer, other than the one on your own distro, they have that too!
Pendrive offers you to format your USB as Fat32 and make it bootable. That means that you will loose everything on it. Nevertheless I advise you to do the formatting and let pendrive deal with it.
Persistency works for me. Your USB is formatted as Fat32 and that is not going to chance. What your installer does is creating a big file, which contains instructions that make that your installed OS will see it as a ext2 formatted "drive". In there are your important folders: home, documents, pictures, music and so on. Only the user of the OS on the stick can see and handle that files.
Your OS will be in another big file on your USB. Only when you booted from the USB you are able to see the filesystem folders. The only files that are visual for others are the boot files and a kernel launcher.
If I remember well pendrive can create a 4 GB persistent file. If your OS takes about the size of a CD-ISO, say 700 MB, you will have a lot of unused capacity on your stick. But you can afterwards create a second partition on the USB that can be mounted in linux. But Windows might have trouble seeing this second partition.
Hope this explanation helps you further. For some reason sometimes updating the OS on the stick causes trouble, but I am still looking for a good solution for that.

[fiik]

I managed to do a direct install onto the USB drive as follows:-

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.

That's if I can be sure I have the right BIOS.