No problem trying to make a liveusb. Success!

[Howard]

I have a Dell mini 10v on its way to me, and, since it has no CD reader, thought that the best way to install PCLINUXOS onto it would be from a liveusb.  Assuming this is right, how do I make one?  I have searched the forum for over an hour and find all sorts of conflicting suggestions, but no clear beginners instructions.

I have a Coremicro 4GB flash drive formatted (using PCC) with one 1900 MiB Fat32 (bootable) and one 1900 MiB ext3 partition.  (The rest of the space is taken up with a "read only CD rom" simulation that I don't seem to be able to remove.)  I do not have any version of windows on this computer, I realise that the liveusb created may not run on this machine as I have no MS-DOS boot, but the mini 10v is supposed to have XP on it.

I tried to run create liveusb from the utilities from two versions of 2009.2 upgraded to KDE4 using both minime 2009.1 and pclos 2009.2 isos.  I always get the same error, when it reaches the copy vmlinuz stage after a bit it stops with a fatal error:

cp: cannot stat /mnt/loop/livecd.sqfs  
No such file or directory.

What am I doing wrong now?  (It's right, there is no such file in /mnt/)

[j-retired]

While the live USB is very useful, I find an external DVD writer VERY useful, and if you think you'll need one for other things, it's the easy and simple way out!

j

[Howard]

Thanks j, I'd rather do it without buying any more hardware.

I have made some progress: in view of all the help I'd received I decided to experiment a bit more myself.  This time I thought I'd try it from the live 2009.2 CD, and this time it seemed to work.  It didn't ask for the location of an iso this time, so I presume it created an image of itself.  Comparing the content of the usb with the CD it all seems to be there.  (Although there's nothing in the boot folder on the CD as far as I can see, although it does boot fine.) 

However, the usb won't boot on my linux only machine, even though it is set to look for a boot sector on a usb it doesn't find one - but the warning on the introduction seemed to imply that it would only boot on a windows machine.

I then took it to my other computer, which has XP as well as various PCLOS installations.  I tried to set the bios to start from a usb, but it didn't recognise the usb as bootable, even though it did find it.

I wonder if it's something to do with the MBR?  I don't know much about them though.  Does something need to be on usb before I make the live usb?   I don't know how to tell whether or not there's an MBR present.  (When I formatted the usb PCC did say that the Fat32 partition was bootable.)

[Joble]

There is a good tutorial for making a live-usb here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,62202.0.html

It's not as complicated as it looks at first, just a step by step process.  The beta boots fine with mine, although without persistence, but it was enough to run it and get it installed.

Hope that helps.

[thorper]

Check the November 2008 PCLOS magazine. There is an excellent article on this subject.

[Howard]

This is my first posting from the new Dell mini 10v, that arrived a couple of hours ago.  From PCLOS of course.

It seems that the problem was with the bios on our Asus desktop.  I reset the bios on the Dell to boot from usb, and it worked.  This was the version I made from "create liveusb" on the 2009.2 live cd.

This little thing has double everything on my old laptop (1 MiB memory, 160 GiB HD, usb2 etc, etc., and batteries, and a web cam too, only the screen is smaller .  One third the price too.  Now to decide what to do with all that space on the HD!

Another satified customer - so far anyway!

[parnote]

Check the November 2008 PCLOS magazine. There is an excellent article on this subject.

Actually, that article was updated and appears in the November 2009 issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine.

parnote

[thorper]

Check the November 2008 PCLOS magazine. There is an excellent article on this subject.

Actually, that article was updated and appears in the November 2009 issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine.

parnote

Since this subject as been raised many many times how about putting the article at the top of this section in the forum? I just know in another coupe of months this question will be asked again.