Help installing for the first time

[v3nus]

I'm trying to install Porteus as a new user on a 64GB SanDisk USB 3.0 drive. I first tryed on my Arch linux machine, where after copying the files from the .iso and running the shell script it claimed installation was successful, but the drive didn't show as bootable in the BIOS. Then I tryed on Windows 10, but running the script causes the message "Installation failed. Please ask for help on the Porteus forum: www.porteus.org/forum". So here I am!
I've tried all different formats of the USB drive, reformatting with both quick format and full erasing, adding or removing the EFI folder, and running the Windows and Linux scripts, and nothing seems to make the drive bootable. I also can't seem to find any log files that might give some insight into why the install is failing.
Help would be greatly appreciated!

[Ed_P]

Welcome to the forum v3nus and sorry for the inconvenience.

A straight forward exFAT format for the USB drive won't work with EFI machines and some old BIOS machines may not support it either. And a FAT32 format won't support your 64GB drive.

Hopefully some experts will stop by an contribute some help.

Added in 21 hours 42 minutes 41 seconds:
Hi v3nus, sorry to be so late getting back to you.

What format is your USB drive?

Some notes I have for creating my USB drives:

Code: Select all

## Run GParted to partition & format the USB drive with a msdos Partition table.  ##
##  Use GParted's View > Device Information to check Partition Table type.        ##
##  Use GParted's Device > Create Partition Table if Partition Table shows as GPT.##
## Or under Windows use:                                                          ##
## > diskpart          * Run Command Prompt with Admin Rights.                    ##
## > list disk                                                                    ##
## >....                                                                          ##
## > select disk 1     * Note: disk nbr is the nbr of the USB disk                ##
## > clean                                                                        ##
## > create partition primary                                                     ##
## > exit                                                                         ##

Added in 12 hours 46 minutes 2 seconds:
With your 64GB USB drive I suggest you make the drive 2 partitions. The 1st partition, the primary one, of about 2 GB and FAT32. The 2nd one can be exFAT or ext4 depending on your needs and while visible in linux it will not be visible in Windows.

Install Porteus to the 1st partition. Once installed further tweaks can be done, like where to save changes to the system.

[vinnie]

In the last (notorious) pc where I tried to boot nemesis from the flash drive, I noticed these things:
1) when I write to the flash drive by launching a program, there is noticeable lag
2) once I had to restart writing syslinux because it seemed like the stick stopped booting. I'm not sure what had happened though, I noticed that:
2.1) I tried giving the command "sync" before shutting down which blocks the i/o prompt until pendent writes are made to all disks, and yes I had to wait several seconds before it releases the terminal
2.2) sometimes when I show the boot menu on my pc (in my case by pressing f8) the usbstick is not always recognized.
3) this pc has the uefi type bios, the crappy graphic one to be clear.

And that makes me think that maybe my usb stick is slow and I need to try adding the cheatcode "waitusb=5" if it works.
Another thing I can think of is to see if you can turn off uefi (if it's on) and go into legacy mode.

P.s. As usual I formatted everything in ext4

[Otto]

My suggestion, always start with
What is your PC spec?
What is your running OS?