Create a USB live flash from a custom distribution

[Alexmaciel34]

I'm working to setup an small PC as a kiosk, I was able to create an USB pen drive with ubuntu 10.10 with a persistent area and I made all the changes I need, everything works but if the PC loss power in most of the cases the file system is corrupted. Now I'm trying to generate a non persistent USB drive, but I'm having some problems.
I was able to install remastersys and create an ISO image of my system (dist) but when I tried to create the USB drive using different Programs, in all cases I get the boot menu but it never complete the login, it just try to keep booting.
The only messages I saw when I create the iso image is a bunch on chown operation fail from remastsys, I'm not sure if it is part of the problem.
Any ideas how to create an USB read only from a persistent one ?

Alex

[yancek]

when I tried to create the USB drive using different Programs

What programs?

The only messages I saw when I create the iso image is a bunch on chown operation fail from remastsys, I'm not sure if it is part of the problem.

I would expect it is at least part of the problem. More details would be helpful as to what exactly you did.

[Alexmaciel34]

I tried with these Programs

- startup cd creator that came with the ubuntu distribution
- pen drive creator
- unetbootin

The three presented the same problems, the USB's are not able to complete the booting, I'll check the messages about th failure during the remastersys and send more information, reading some blogs some people says you have to change the user name on the config file for remastersys, this may be part of the problem.

Alex

[yancek]

Are you using these programs on an iso you created with remastersys in Ubuntu? I don't know if that would work. I noticed when I used remastersys that the initrd file name changed in Ubuntu 10.10 from the installation intrd.lz to initrd.gz. Might check that. I would expect an error to show up if that were the case. It did when I first tried it.
The standard user name for remastersys is "custom" which should have shown during the remastersys process. No password by default.

[Alexmaciel34]

Yes,I'm using an iso image I created with remastersys, I solved the issue with the chown during the iso generation but still not booting, I'll check the lz and gz extension, what I should do, change the extension ?

Alex

PD: the problem with the chown was because I was using an USB as additional memory to generate the image and it was formatted FAT 32 and not ext3, I formatted the USB as ext3 and the messages dissapiered but I'm still having problems with the booting part.

[yancek]

Are you booting from your system on the computer? or are you setting the flash drive to first boot and trying to boot from it?

I'll check the lz and gz extension, what I should do, change the extension ?

Loop mount your iso file and check to see what the initrd file extension is, should be in the boot directory. You need to have that entry correctin your grub.cfg file or isolinux.cfg file for it to boot. I don't actually know that is the problem? You didn't give any specific information on why it wasn't booting, what happened? Any error messages? blinking cursor? Did you install Grub2 to the mbr of the flash drive? Or are you using isolinux to boot? More specifics on exactly what happens when trying to boot would help.

[voidpointer69]

Alexmaciel34,

A word re the file system corruption of your USB Stick.

I assume that you are writing things onto to it. The thing is, the system will cache writes so if you lose power, it is possible that some adjustment to the filesystem, whether user data or filesystem-related stuff, is getting lost.

Maybe you can have a little script that flushes the disc buffers every couple of seconds or so - look up the command "sync". It cannot guarantee to avoid the underlying problem but maybe will minimise the risk a bit.

[Alexmaciel34]

Yancek,

Some more information,

I have my system booting from the USB that I created.

Below is the content of my syslinux config file:

default vesamenu.c32
prompt 0
timeout 300

menu title Custom Live CD
menu background splash.png
menu color title 1;37;44 #c0ffffff #00000000 std

label live
menu label live - boot the Live System
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

label xforcevesa
menu label xforcevesa - boot Live in safe graphics mode
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper xforcevesa initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

label install
menu label install - start the installer directly
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet splash --

label textonly
menu label textonly - boot Live in textonly mode
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper textonly initrd=/casper/initrd.gz quiet --

label debug
menu label debug - boot the Live System without splash and show boot info
kernel /casper/vmlinuz
append noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true file=/cdrom/preseed/custom.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.gz nosplash --

label memtest
menu label memtest - Run memtest
kernel /isolinux/memtest
append -

label hd
menu label hd - boot the first hard disk
localboot 0x80
append -



The procedure I used to create the USB is to use rematersys (Dist and Bckup, I tested both) and generate an ISO image, then I use the Startup Disk Creator from Ubuntu and I generated an USB Live Flash disk without any persistent area (0 MB).
When I tried to boot from the USB then the boot menu appears and any option but the memcheck will just make the counter seconds come back to 30 seconds not message on the screen.
What I did is just to test I copied the vmlinuz and inetrd.lz in the casper directory and the computer complete the booting from the USB but I got some other problems like:

- Requires user and password
- The network manager doesn't allow to enable the network, presenting two warnings both related to org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerSystemSettings was not provided by any .service files.

I know that copying the two files is not the right solution, any idea why is not booting with the inetrd.gz generated by the Startup creator ?
One difference is that the original USB I think is using Grub, I see a grub directory into the boot area.
Thanks for any suggestions.

[Alexmaciel34]

Void,
Thanks for the advise I'll try that temporally until I get a read only USB.
My application only requires to boot, connect to the network and open FF into full screen mode directed to an specific page.
The ideal is to have a read only system and may be just a very small rw are only for the configuration information like network or address of the web page I need to show. I general I'm not writing on propose but if I remove power a couple of times in general the system will not complete the booting process and some messages related to passwords files (but I'm not sure it the real reason) appears and the system stock on the ubuntu startup screen.

[Alexmaciel34]

I checked more carefully and it's looks like the main issue is that Startup Disk Creator didn't copy the vmlinuz, I tried to change the syslinux config file and use the inetrd.lz and it didn't complete the booting this time, then what made the computer boot it was to copy the vmlinuz file, any suggestions ?