this should be a collection of posts, the initial one (aka this one) shall be sort of an index that links to one specific follow up post in this thread.
What I can think of for now are these topics:
Formatting and mkfs using fdisk and mkfs.*
Formatting and mkfs using gparted
Caveats when using a SD-Card
Tips for USB thumbdrives
Tips for external USB harddrives
The standard way of installinp Porteus on a USB device is to extract the files and folders from the ISO (some Compression utilities on Windows can open ISO files for copying - e.g. 7z, WInzip, WinRAR)
Cave! Keep the hierarchy and folders as they are in the ISO
Example: I mounted the Porteus-XFCE-v5.0-x86_64.iso ISO using mloop of porteus.
Then it is available in /mnt/loop:
Code: Select all
guest@porteus:/mnt/loop$ ls -o --time-style=long-iso
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 3 root 2048 2020-05-04 21:12 EFI
-r--r--r-- 1 root 1512 2019-11-17 03:32 USB_INSTALLATION.txt
dr-xr-xr-x 4 root 2048 2021-06-02 05:57 boot
dr-xr-xr-x 6 root 2048 2021-07-03 08:50 porteus
What you execute to make it bootable is in here:
Code: Select all
guest@porteus:/mnt/loop$ ls -o --time-style=long-iso boot/
total 570
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root 384374 2022-05-09 10:52 Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root 192745 2022-05-08 07:49 Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root 2048 2021-06-14 10:27 docs
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root 4096 2022-07-02 14:41 syslinux
Go to wherever your USB drive is mounted and go into the boot/ folder there and execute
Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe when you currently run Windows
or execute
Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com when you currently run any kind of Linux.
Make sure you select the correct device, e.g. you mounted your USB thumbdrive in /mnt/sdb1 - then go to /mnt/sdb1/boot/ and execute the appropriate Porteus-installer-for-*
When boot fails, first check if the md5sum of the downloaded iso is correct, aka check the md5sum of your local file with the md5sum of the file that holds that info on the server.
If there is a mismatch in md5sums, download the ISO again and try again copying all the files.
In such a case you not need to partition and mkfs the USB drive anew, just delete all files and folders of your previous attempt and copy all files and folders of your new download.
Only if you fail doing so (e.g. one file is locked and cannot be removed) you have to partition and mkfs anew.
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When addons or improvements are proposed to one of the booting from USB methods in a follow up post, the initial post as linked in this index post should be updated. If you cannot update it yourself (e.g. because the post is too old by then) ask one of the forum moderators to do so:
francois - Ed_P - and yours truly [= Rava] (e.g. by sending a PM)