What Am I Doing Wrong?

[nheather]

I am trying to create a bootable USB Memory Stick with Porteus V5.0 KDE.

My computer runs Windows 10 and has a legacy BIOS (not UEFI).

I have downloaded the ISO, burnt it to CD, and this boots into Porteus without any problem.

My memory stick is 64GB and formatted in EX-FAT.

I run the Porteus Installer, insert and mount the USB stick, select it and press NEXT.

I check the two tick boxes - that I understand that the USB stick will overwritten and that I want the stick to be made bootable.

I get prompted to enter the root password.

The process then starts - I get an 'installing' progress bar that never fills up but eventually completes and clearly the files have been copied even though the progress bar never showed that.

I then get a message that the normal loader cant be used because it doesn't support EX-FAT so it is using LILO instead.

This message just sits on the screen forever, there is no prompt to do anything, but when I eventually become bored and press enter I get a message that the installation has completed.

My computer BIOS is setup to do USB boots first and I have confirmed that with other bootable sticks.

So shutdown and start the computer with the memory stick installed and ... nothing ... it goes straight to Windows load from the hard disk.

I have tried this on two computers both with USB boot set as the priority - the stick gets ignorred on both.

What am I doing wrong?

[unknown]

Try formatting the pen drive to FAT32.

[nheather]

Try formatting the pen drive to FAT32.

FAT32 only supports drives up to 4GB.

It might well be that the Porteus Installer only works with FAT32 but if that is the case then it is very poorly written because it knows the format used and even refers to it in a message so should stop abort the install with an appropriate message and reason.

But it proceeds and then states that it completed successfully.

[nheather]

Think it is time to give up with Porteus and try something else.

I've just tried with a FAT32 formatted 2GB USB memory stick.

This time when it came to make it bootable it proceeded without any pause and then displayed an error message for just one second before removing it so it could not be read.

In my opinion, the Porteus Installer is very poorly written because

1) the load files progress bar does not display any progress
2) the message about LILO just sits on the screen indefinitely without prompting the user to do anything
3) It displays error messages and removes them one second later so the user does not have time to read them
4) And most importantly, it doesn't work, not with EX-FAT and not with FAT32

[AcnapyxoB]

FAT32 only supports drives up to 4GB.

FAT32 support drives up to 2 terabytes and files to 4 GB.
You can format any drive to fat32 and also it is compatible with a wide range of devices... Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, game consoles...

Remember:
Things that go hard in the beginning are more stable over time.
Don't give up!

[nheather]

FAT32 only supports drives up to 4GB.

FAT32 support drives up to 2 terabytes and files to 4 GB.
You can format any drive to fat32 and also it is compatible with a wide range of devices... Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, game consoles...

Remember:
Things that go hard in the beginning are more stable over time.
Don't give up!

Okay, in Windows it won't allow FAT32 to be selected when formatting a 64GB memory stick.

But assuming that I can manage to format the 64GB drive using FAT32 that doesn't address the fact that I did try with a FAT32 2GB memory stick and Porteus Installer failed with that too - unfortunately, the error message is only displayed for 1 second so I couldn't see what it was complaining abaout.

[unknown]

Why are you using a CD to create a porteus bootable usb. You can directly create a bootable USB in windows, just by copying the contents of .iso file to the usb and running the "Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe" present inside the boot folder.

[nheather]

Why are you using a CD to create a porteus bootable usb. You can directly create a bootable USB in windows, just by copying the contents of .iso file to the usb and running the "Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe" present inside the boot folder.

Because that is what the Porteus instructions say is the best way of doing it - just following their instructions.

Anyway, you may be right because I've now managed to download a formatter so that I can format my memory stick to FAT32 (the Windows 10 formatter won't allow this).

Just tried running the Porteus Installer - went through everything without error, got a success message - but doesn't work, does not boot, goes straight to windows. I have he BIOS settings correct - I have tried with a know good bootable memory stick and that works fine.

Basically all the Porteus Installer appears to be doing is copying across the contents of the ISO which, as you say, I could do with folder drag and drop in Windows. It is not making the USB stick bootable, despite what it claims.

Going to try your method next.

[nheather]

Why are you using a CD to create a porteus bootable usb. You can directly create a bootable USB in windows, just by copying the contents of .iso file to the usb and running the "Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe" present inside the boot folder.

Just tried your method - get success messages when I run the installer exe - but doesn't work, the USB stick isn't bootable.

[tome]

Maybe you need kernel compiled with:
CONFIG_MEMSTICK_REALTEK_PCI=y
CONFIG_MEMSTICK_REALTEK_USB=y
Without it with everything on sdcard boot won't work" - vmlinuz can't read modules on sdcard". BTW You can install any bootloader from Linux command line and then add manually Porteus entries.

[fulalas]

1- When you format the USB stick, please make sure it's using 'msdos' partition table. If you don't know, use another distro to make sure (in Gparted you can check this in the File System column).
2- Some BIOS refuse to boot using legacy mode, so you have to format using FAT32 and make sure you have copied the EFI folder from the ISO.
3- Can you boot any other distro using this same setup and USB stick?
4- PorteuX (https://github.com/porteux/porteux) has made some improvements in the Linux installer, so maybe you could give it a try (also make sure you read the instructions in the install.txt located in the root of the ISO).

[Ed_P]

Because that is what the Porteus instructions say is the best way of doing it - just following their instructions.

Where are you finding those instructions? Not from the website's tutorials: 114 Official Porteus Installation Guide and not from the /USB_INSTALLATION.txt file that is in the ISO file you downloaded nheather. You copy all the ISO files and folders to the USB drive then run the /boot/Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe app. The boot partition on the USB drive must be the 1st partition.

When you format the USB stick, please make sure it's using 'msdos' partition table.

A GPT partition table works also. Uefi and porteus 3.0

[Rava]

A GPT partition table works also. Uefi and porteus 3.0

But he said he has a BIOS system:

My computer runs Windows 10 and has a legacy BIOS (not UEFI).

Added in 2 minutes 35 seconds:
nheather
My tips:

First try fulalas approach (points 1 to 4 ) from What Am I Doing Wrong? (Post by fulalas #95723)

If that does not work, maybe you need the tweaks tome mentioned in What Am I Doing Wrong? (Post by tome #95721)

[nheather]

Thanks for the help. I have managed to get it working.

I can only think it was an issue with the formatting. Windows won't format FAT32 on sticks that size.

So I downloaded some third party software that claimed to have worked - but couldn't get the install to work.

Out of desperation I tried another 3rd party tool and this one works fine as did the install.

So all working now - need to get my head around how it works now.

[Rava]

Good to know you get the installer working, I presume Porteus and KDE boot and start flawlessly.

For the lurkers: When you have a CD ISO of Porteus (or any other recent Linux distro) and can boot that CD, you can use the build-in tools to format any drive to VFAT as mentioned above.
the most easy to use would be gparted since it's GUI based, but when you feel good working on a terminal you can also use fdisk and mkfs.vfat . (gparted is just a frontend for several terminal programs anyway)

Cave! on this:

please make sure it's using 'msdos' partition table