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Just a bit of backstory, I am at a work-search office today on one of their computers and it has no permissions whatsoever, making their computers nigh impossible to use for me, particularly because I use a highly customed keyboard layout only available in Linux.

I have my thumb-drive today however, and thought I would make a bootable-usb that I can work from instead. The thing is, is that without any permissions, I can not run any of the USB thumb drive installers, and so I am trying to figure out how to do this manually. I already have the thumb drive formatted to Fat, so is it just a matter of copying the ISO contents to the drive? Thanks.

Anon
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    Are you sure that booting from your thumb drive is in accordance with the Terms of Use of "a work-search office"? – waltinator Nov 14 '19 at 21:55
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    If the computer boots UEFI you should just need to copy the ISO contents to the FAT32 formatted USB drive. – C.S.Cameron Nov 15 '19 at 08:28
  • @C.S.Cameron https://askubuntu.com/questions/1189020/how-can-i-get-a-live-only-drive-with-ubuntu-19-10-and-newer-versions kinda disagrees with that idea. – K7AAY Nov 15 '19 at 18:36
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    @K7AAY : I understand that sudodus is talking "cloned" drives, such as "Startup Disk Creator" and "mkusb Live only" make as ISO9660. Limited to 19.10 and later. See his comments on this page: https://askubuntu.com/questions/395879/how-to-create-uefi-only-bootable-usb-live-media – C.S.Cameron Nov 16 '19 at 03:48
  • @K7AAY, I think C.S.Cameron is right: If the computer boots in UEFI mode, you should just need to copy the ISO contents to the FAT32 formatted USB drive (and you do not need administrator priveleges to do it). – sudodus Nov 17 '19 at 17:47
  • See also the following link help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/iso2usb and scroll down to 'Do it yourself'. – sudodus Nov 17 '19 at 17:58

1 Answers1

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To Confirm Ability to Create Live/Persistent USB in Windows 10 Without Administrator permissions

  • Format flash drive to as new state, (FAT32)

  • Open the 19.10 ISO in Windows 10 File Explorer and copy the contents to the flashdrive.

Persistence

There are several methods to make the flash drive persistent. Using a casper-rw partition is not limited to 4GB.

Alt 1

  • Boot the drive using UEFI

  • At the grub menu press "e" to edit the menu

  • Add a space and "toram" after ..quiet splash,,,

  • Open GParted, select the USB drive, unmount and Resize/Move to make room for a persistent partition

  • In the available space create an ext4 partition and label it casper-rw

  • Mount grub.cfg. In Terminal run

    sudo mkdir -p /mnt/sd1

    sudo mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt/sd1

Where x is the OS partition

  • As root edit boot/grub/grub.cfg by adding a space and the word persistent after the first ...quiet splash --- and save.

Alt 2

  • Open Boot/grub/grub.cfg in Windows 10 latest build

  • After quiet splash ---, type a space and "persistent"

  • Boot the drive using UEFI

  • At the grub menu press "e" to edit the menu

  • Change "persistent" to "toram"

  • Open GParted, select the USB drive, unmount and Resize/Move to make room for a persistent partition

  • In the available space create an ext4 partition and label it casper-rw

The drive should now be ready for work

  • You can create a new user and install programs as you wish.
C.S.Cameron
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  • Edit grub.cfg in the live system as described at help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/iso2usb/diy#Edit_grub.cfg in Linux. But it would be good if you test and verify a method that works directly in Windows (without getting problems because of the different code between each line (newline in linux, carriage-return + newline in Windows) in text files. – sudodus Nov 17 '19 at 18:04
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    @sudodus. Had a little mental blockage last night. Above method is now working OK, Thanks. I was able to edit grub.cfg in Win10. – C.S.Cameron Nov 18 '19 at 02:05
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    @sudodus, I think it may still need a little testing. Looks fine in Notepad with Build 18363, but compacted in Build 17134. Perhaps editing while open in toram might be best. – C.S.Cameron Nov 18 '19 at 03:18
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    I agree, that editing while running live with toram might be best. And I think it is a good idea to make people aware of possible problems when editing in Windows because of different coding of line breaks (newline in linux, carriage-return + newline in Windows). – sudodus Nov 18 '19 at 07:32
  • @sudodus It works for sure and it is not that much more work. – C.S.Cameron Nov 18 '19 at 11:45