Howto make USB boot drives

[sudodus]

@jdeca57,

Thanks for your tip about ddrescue, a tool that I am using right now to extract as much as possible from a friend's two DVD disks from the baptize ceremony for his son. The DVD disks are terribly scratched and ddrescue does a tremendous job. I have used ddrescue to save what can be saved from failing hard disk drives too

mkusb can manage iso files that exceed 4 GiB. The problem of my previous post is about files contained in the iso files (in this particular case install.wim) that exceed 4 GiB in recent Windows iso files. I don't think any file inside a Knoppix 'DVD' iso file exceeds that level, and by the way, that is not relevant, when cloning the iso file.

ddrescue as well as dd and other *cloning tools* can create live-only boot drives from linux iso files that are hybrid iso files. mkusb can also clone it (and in a safer way, because it helps you identify the target drive and provides a final checkpoint).

---

Do I read your post correctly, when I assume that the current Knoppix DVD iso file is a hybrid iso file? Previous versions, that I have tested were not, and must be treated with isohybrid in order to make USB boot drives when cloned. See the following link,

help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/install-to-debian#Knoppix.

[jdeca57]

@jdeca57,


Do I read your post correctly, when I assume that the current Knoppix DVD iso file is a hybrid iso file? Previous versions, that I have tested were not, and must be treated with isohybrid in order to make USB boot drives when cloned.

Well if you mean that it booted after a ddrescue and nothing else then yes, the current 8.2 is hybrid. But OK, in a few weeks they release 8.5...

[sudodus]

Well if you mean that it booted after a ddrescue and nothing else then yes, the current 8.2 is hybrid. But OK, in a few weeks they release 8.5...

Yes, that is what I mean. I downloaded and tried the current version of Knoppix and you are right.

It looks very interesting; for example, after cloning it uses the remaining space of the USB pendrive for a partition 'KNOPPIX-DATA' with the reiserfs file system. It manages to create a persistent live system automatically (after cloning)!

[again?]

Yes, that is what I mean. I downloaded and tried the current version of Knoppix and you are right.

It looks very interesting; for example, after cloning it uses the remaining space of the USB pendrive for a partition 'KNOPPIX-DATA' with the reiserfs file system. It manages to create a persistent live system automatically (after cloning)!

Wowee, that was easy using knoppix and gddrescue.
Downloaded and installed to a 15gb usb stick.
Automatically created an 11gb data partition.
Booted up to an lxde session with compiz as window manager...wobbly windows and all.
Installed kupfer and plank and still there after a reboot.

[sudodus]

mkusb version 12.3.2 for version 19.10, Eoan Eanimal

The PPA at Launchpad includes versions of mkusb for the new developing version 19.10, Eoan Eanimal

mkusb was tested today, 2019-05-04, with a Lubuntu daily iso file from the testing tracker, eoan-desktop-amd64.iso, and it works as it should.

---

If you run standard Ubuntu [persistent] live, you need an extra instruction to get the repository Universe. (Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu have the repository Universe activated automatically.)

Text after the # character is not used by the shell interpreter, it is a comment for the human eye.

sudo add-apt-repository universe  # this line only for standard Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa          # stable PPA for regular usage
# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/unstable   # PPA for development and testing; remove the # in front of the command to use it
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mkusb

sudo apt-get install usb-pack-efi  # for persistent live drives that work in UEFI and BIOS mode with 32-bit iso files

[tieuvan]

Thank you very much!

[jools77]

This tool is very nice and seems to be quite polished. But unfortunately it couldn't make my live and persistent linux mint 19.2 work with uefi and secure boot: I get the notification "operating system loader signature not found"

[sudodus]

@jools77,

I think that Linux Mint does not provide a signed kernel. It means that it should work in UEFI mode if you turn off secure boot. Standard Ubuntu and the Ubuntu family flavours (Kubuntu, Lubuntu ... Xubuntu) do provide a signed kernel and should work also with secure boot, at least when installed. But I think there can be problems to boot some computers from USB with secure boot even with a signed kernel.

[jahja]

Hello! Firstly, thank you for taking the time to create this tool - i've just used it to do a dual boot windows/kubuntu system and it was a nice easy tool to use.

I just wanted to make one suggestion for improvement! I have always used Unetbootin in the past, but the ppa seems to be down for 18.04 onwards, hence I was looking for another tool. Mkusb has worked wonderfully apart from one thing - persistence made the Kubuntu install extremely slow. This is something I've been doing for years with Unetbootin and never experienced this problem, and having looked around the web a bit it seems that there are some other people with the same experience.

Most people suggest "buy a really quick USB key" but the truth is I've been regularly using two old usb keys (both more than 5yrs old and with lots of R/W usage) - always the same two, and like I said with Unetbootin this never happened.

So I thought it might be helpful for the developer to check out how Unetbootin implements persistence, and work out what it does differently, it might be easy to make the same change for mkusb and the performance is 10x quicker or more. The only downside to making USBs persistent in Unetbootin, was that if you selected a large persistence file, say 4gb, on an old stick like mine, it took ages to actually make the stick. But once it was made it ran as smooth as a hard drive.

Thanks again, I hope this might be of some help!

[sudodus]

@jahja,

I see your point, but I am afraid, that there will be other disadvantages, if I would modify mkusb to use a file for persistence the same way as Unetbootin does. That would limit the size of the storage for persistence to 4 GB. Instead I suggest the following methods to make things faster:

1. Backup all persistent data
2. Use mkusb to overwrite the whole USB device with zeros (which can restore the write speed of an old USB pendrive to almost the original speed)
3. Use mkusb to create a fresh persistent live system

If you still have problems, you can do one or both of the following things

4. Use gparted to reduce the size of the partition for persistence to the same as the file for persistence that you use with Unetbootin
5. Use gparted to create an ext2 file system in the partition for persistence. Remember to set the label to 'casper-rw'

I would be very interested in your result, how these steps can change the speed of your persistent live system.