Linux installer doesn't seem to complete

[PierreMDL]

Hello all,

I've been using Porteus 5.01 KDE through a usb drive. Until now, I've been following the instructions provided, namely copy both porteus and boot folders onto the drive, then run Porteus-installer-for-Windows.exe with admin rights, and that works alright.
Now in order to persist changes, I need a different file system. So through a Linux OS I've formatted my USB drive into ext4, copied the very same folders, and run Porteus-installer-for-Linux.com as root and... it doesn't work. Now my machine doesn't seem to acknowlege the drive is bootable.
When I run the Linux script, after confirming the target folder, I don't get any success messages like when running the Windows one, nor any error messages anyway.

Any clue what could be the issue? Anything I can do remediate this?

Thanks

[Ed_P]

Rather than reformatting the whole drive and reinstalling Porteus you could have created a 2nd partition on the USB drive and formatted it as ext2 and used it for saving changes.

You also could have saved changes by creating a Porteus save.dat file.

Did you use the mkfs.xfs command when reformatting the USB drive?

This link may help with creating a bootable USB drive:
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/boot-par ... filesystem

If your computer uses EFI the 1st partition must be FAT32 and the EFI Secure Boot option disabled.

[PierreMDL]

Hi Ed, thanks

Actually I've been struggling with using the .dat savefile trick, doing so instead of fresh starts inevitably seems to end up in a "ZSTD-compressed data is corrupt. --System halted" at the next boot. I was hoping the formatting of the drive in Ext4 would solve that.
My drive is super small (4Go), but I'll try having two partitions side by side, I didn't know Porteus would work that way!

[Ed_P]

Save.dat corruption can happen when not giving the shutdown time to write the updates to the file and removing the drive too quickly. It can also happen if the save.dat is too small for the updates being saved, which I've experienced. And why I make a backup of my save.dat periodically.

[PierreMDL]

Oh, maybe I've been impatient then. Anyway so far the two partition solution works well, that's satisfying. I'll read the resource you've shared. This all is very new to me.

[Ed_P]

the two partition solution works well

This all is very new to me.

I can relate. It was all new to me also 10 yrs ago.

[vinnie]

Oh, maybe I've been impatient then.

If I can give you a tip, before removing a disk, if you have any doubt, give the command “sync” on a terminal, the command will release the prompt only when all the disks have actually finished writing.