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I am new to Ubuntu and really loved the experience of working on it through the live USB. However the limit of 4GB on the persistence file is something which I wanted to get away from (Tried the repartition and naming partition Casper-rw etc)

My Dell Laptop (Intel Core i5-2410 2.3GHz, 4 GB RAM) is currently running on Windows 7. For various reasons I don't want to do dual boot (Not at least till I am used to UBUNTU big time) hence I decided to give it a shot to do a full install on my 16GB pen drive.

I loaded live UBUNTU and installed Virtual Box on it. I only mounted my 16GB USB on VM and did a full install using the server version of Ubuntu 14.04 (in order to get rid of additional software at the time of installation)

I would like to mention two of my selections at the time of install:

  1. I selected the "USE FULL DISK" option hence Ubuntu partitioned my disk to have 2GB swap and 14GB main partition with EXT4. (The drive loaded to the virtual machine had UUID /dev/sda)

  2. At the time of the installation, since I was on a Virtual Machine, it never detected any additional OS on my /dev/sda drive (USB) and I wrote to the MBR of USB.

Now when I try to boot the system through USB I get a Gave up waiting error. I went through various questions on the forum and this one is the closest.

Gave up waiting for root device on Ubuntu

However it didn't work for me. when I do

blkid

it shows that my hard disk which has Windows 7 (NTFS) as sda and my USB as sdb

Since I am new to Ubuntu I really don't understand how do I get it working without touching my hard disk.

If someone can help me with this stating step by step (Please don't provide a simple command but also tell me if I can do it on the boot screen or I have to go into Live USB again and edit files in full install USB), I would be really grateful.

Community
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Gaurav Arora
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  • I tried installing a Ubuntu-based distro (Linux Mint) directly onto a 16GB usb drive before, it was exceptionally slow and crashed repeatedly, probably writing the 150,000-250,000 files and then tons of read-writes was too much for the drive (wasn't a no-name brand either). I would not do a full install to a usb flash drive/card again, but they're perfect for an iso to boot & run "live", or live with persistence. I run live and save wanted data to a usb or hard drive. But dual-booting isn't hard either, I think windows can make free space/partitions itself, then ubuntu "fills in the blanks" – Xen2050 Nov 25 '14 at 10:10
  • Apparently putting swap space on a USB drive is a very bad idea – kuzzooroo Dec 17 '16 at 20:53

1 Answers1

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You have plenty of room on the 16G stick for Ubuntu desktop. The server version doesn't even come with X, let alone a desktop, so think about what you want. grub probably got confused about the devices, and wrote the /etc/grub/grub.cfg file with wrong devices -- typically they are one device too high, e.g. sdb instead of sda, hd2 instead of hd1 etc. but maybe hd0 is right for your case, and hd1 is being used. You can edit the grub.cfg file from the live session, or if you get to a grub prompt, use the tab completion feature to track down what disk is used (the UUIDs where used are OK). For example, at the grub prompt, type ls (hd then TAB to see what disks are available (assume hd0 and hd1). Choose 0 so you get ls (hd0)/ TAB and use tab again to see what's on the root of the disk. If you see ubuntu directories, hd0 is your device (or sda if that's used anywhere). If you see Windows files, use the other disk. Eventually you should be able to find the right path to the grub.cfg file, and pull it in with the "configfile (hd0)/boot/grub/grub.cfg. Now you should have a grub menu, and instructions on screen to edit (type e, fix the disk references, then thpe ctrl-X or F10 to boot. After the first successful boot, run

sudo update_grub

to fix the disks. After getting boot to work, you can work on improving the performance, basically moving things into memory. C.S.Cameron has some forum posts and questions on this topic. Or just use the guest account, which is in ram.

ubfan1
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