Recommended USB size for installation of Beta # 4

IF you talk about flashdrive: 1GB is needed, I have one of 2GB. It works as the Live CD, so it's a Live USB not a regular installation.

It can be install on a HD drive, that needs to be at least 3.5GB I think. (I also think you need to use initrd option)
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I have the beta 4 booted with the live CD. When I try to make my 2.0GB USB Pin drive boot MEPIS it goes through the steps and says all is well but... it only takes about 1 minute to complete to whole process and when I try to boot the USB it only goes to a command line GRUB prompt. I don't think it is actually copying MEPIS.

Any ideas?

It is a Cruzer Micro Pin drive

Make sure the USB flashdrive is NOT mounted when you install on it. Does it show in the menu?

After you install on it you can mount it to check if you have the mepis files on it. If you do have files on it and still doesn't boot up it might have to do with your computer BIOS. it has to allow USB booting, and that has to be the first drive to boot from.

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I have the same results that johnboy does above. I installed beta 4 to a 4g Adata drive. When I boot all I get is Grub prompt and can do nothing. The machine can boot from the usb drive with puppy linux and it has Mepis files on the drive. Any suggestions? Do I need to use the mbr command to "create" a mbr section on the usb drive? Thanks for the help. The beta looks great.

For me it just works and it boots from 3 different computers (on one I have to replug it when it boots because the BIOS somehow disconnects it)

What exactly do you mean by "can't do anything", do you get any error message?
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I got mine to work now. My Cruzer Micro 2GB drive had that crappy U3 Scandisk Launchpad installed. Once I downloaded the uninstall tool and removed it all is well. I am typing this from the USB now!!!

Great stuff!!!

Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? I installed from USB in 2 minutes... that's now my favorite way to install MEPIS.
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when I boot from the usb drive I get a grub prompt with a flashing cursor. At that point I can not enter anything and have to restart the computer with the power button. There are no error messages. When I installed Mepis to the usb drive the only messsage I got was that it was successful.
As far as I know there is no other software on the usb drive (thanks johnboy I'm glad you got it to work). I will investigate to see if there is something hidden. I did format the drive with cfdisk previously because of a mess I made trying to install debian to the drive.

Thanks for any and all help. I will "play with it some more".
Can I treat the drive like another hard drive? I have not used usb drives very much I got this one because of its size and price.

"Can I treat the drive like another hard drive?"
Not really, it works like a Live CD, read-only, you can repartition and create another partition on it if you want afterwards, I used gparted to resize the partition and create a new one.
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My USB was acting the same way. I thought I had got rid of the Launch Pad software because even in QTParted It would not see any "partition", files, etc... on the drive but every time I would boot to Windows and plug in the drive the U3 Launchpad would start.

One thing that kept making me think there was "something" still on the drive was that when the MEPIS to USB process would start it would only take about 30 seconds for the files to copy once it was formated. I know MEPIS is fast but I thought 30 seconds to copy the file system was a little too fast. My guess is that it was able to format the drive, install GRUB but when it went to copy the file system the geometry of the drive was not what it seemed to be.

I don't know what type of USB drive you are using so I don't even know if this will help you. But maybe...

Thank's johnboy. I seem to be able to install all the Mepis files on the flash (I think) at least it takes several minutes and they appear to be there but when I boot from the drive all I get is the Grub prompt mentioned before. I think that there is a "security" partition on the drive that is causing the problem but have been unable to remove it. The manual and Adata's (the manufacture) website are useless.
Part of the reason I bought it was because it claimed to have linux support and was bootable.

It is an 4GB Adata usb 2.0 flash Disk model PD2
I have tried partitioning it using gparted, cfdisk, and the disk that came with the drive using windows

The results seem to be the same. I also tried using the following from the Debian installation manual.

"If your system refuses to boot from the memory stick, the stick may contain an invalid master boot record (MBR). To fix this, use the install-mbr command from the package mbr:
# install-mbr /dev/sda"

I'm not sure what else to try. I've googled and can't seem to find the answer. I also emailed Adata.

At least I can use it to store data.

Any and all suggestions would be helpful.

thanks again

It's also useful to test it on other computers, just in case there's some incompatibility with your BIOS.
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I installed puppy linux on the drive and it works great.
I needed to use an option they had to install a mbr file called "mbr.bin from the syslinux package".
I thought that might solve the problem but it changed nothing when I reinstalled Mepis to the drive.
I have no way of checking on another machine at this time. Why would puppy work and not Mepis?
I really appreciate all the help. I have a friend coming over later with a LG 1 gig drive maybe we can get it to work. I had hoped that the 4 GB would be able run linux with room for lots of data.
Any other ideas?

That's not what I asked you, I didn't ask you if "other" distros boot from USB drive, I asked you to test if MEPIS USB boots on other computers.

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I have a pd9 2gb Adata drive that I have tried 3 times without success to make a mepis bootable usb drive. The first time, all the files copied OK, I could see them after I unplugged, re-inserted and mounted the drive, but nothing more than a grub prompt as explained above, requiring a reset.

I formatted the adata drive using qtparted, it disappeared from my desktop, so I unplugged it and plugged it into a windows machine and low and behold, there was the adata utility with a padlock to indicate it was locked. Where did that come from I thought - maybe it was hard coded in as rom. I tried deleting it but was not permitted. Oh well, lets see if linux can do better. Sure enough, I deleted the file, Great I thought, that's got that out of the way, let's try again.

4 minutes later, I had mepis on usb again, but it was after 5 so I toddled off home to try it on my Athlon 3G. The system told me it was not a bootable drive, no grub or anything else for that matter.

OK, time to give up and return the flash drive back to storage only, so I plug it into my laptop with mepis 6.0-4 beta4 and upon trying to mount it, the drive contents (nothing) display in a new konqueror window and the mount popup screen will not go away. 3 minutes later, it's still there so I hit cancel to get rid of the screen but do you think I was able to write anything to the drive? not a chance. I unmount the drive and the same thing happens, the mount screen gets stuck, so in frustration, I just pull the drive out. and plug it into a windows pc and it looks fine, no issues, no utility, can write to the drive fine.

Plug it back into my linux laptop and same again. mount popup is locked, leave it there and make a new text file on the drive, the mount popup goes away. I load up 1.1gb of stuff onto the drive, the process finishes and 10 minutes later, I notice the drives light is flashing away frantically - hmmmm. Another 5 minutes and it has stopped. Unmounting takes close to 2 minutes before I can safely remove the drive because the drives light is still flashing.

Unplug and replug, mount and try writing and dismounting, all is ok, operation is what I would call normal.

I am going to try again, but I have this impression that this and other adata flash drive may simply not be suitable for a bootable mepis on a flash drive.

Will somebody please prove me wrong. I am going all out to prove myself wrong too.

Mike P

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Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis

I haven't got Mepis to boot from either the adata drive or a lg drive. I have gotten pupply linx to boot from both. As suggested by AdrianTM it may be my bios. As I said earlier I have no way at this time to check that, maybe in a few days.

What do you think is the difference between puppy and Mepis that lets one work and not the other? Different bootloaders?

Does Mepis need to be installed to make this work or can it all be done from the live cd?

Note to Mike P. Sounds like you're dancing to the same tune I am. I don't remember the padlock but I did use the adata disk utility to reduce the security partition to zero, after I screwed up and made it the max and made the drive useless. It still shows a small secure partion and I wonder if that might be causing the problem.

During boot up from usb stick the only massage I've got
was "GRUB GRUB" then happens nothing.

We have a few systems there I can try it out on that use Motherboards from Asus, MSI and Albatron and a couple of laptops too, all ranging from 1.1ghz to the latest dual cores, both intel and AMD, but as I'll be the only tech in on Tuesday (we have a long weekend in the upper north island of NZ), I'll probably be rushed off my feet fixing the hoardes of viruses that kill all the locals windows machines besides prepping new pc's for sale and I won't get a chance till Thursday as I have external appointments on Wednesday.

Mike P

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Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis

You can do it from the live CD. That's how I did...

Finally found a machine that boots from the Adata flash drive.

I'm using a 1Gb flash drive, brand new, first time ever plugged into a machine was to make it a Mepis Bootable drive and I'm happy to report it works like a charm.

Mike P

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Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis

I have had similar experiences. Two different flash drives. Both would boot DSL and PCLinux OS, on any of 3 different PC's. Tried Mepis beta 4 and 5.1 to make a bootable key. one key ( that worked with DSL and PCL) it would either get no grub or it would not find the kernel to boot- on 3 different machines.
The other key finally did work after 2 tries with beta 5.1

It is still "buggy", but great when it works.

just download iso, burn to cdr or cdrw, copy all cd contents to a folder... there is a script to create a stick install in linux... also a bat file for windows use... open the folder with copied files in XP... do a start,run,cmd for dos box and
run bat file pointed to path of stick... reboot with stick as boot device and there you go... will try mepis to stick later...