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To start with here are my specs:

  • 970 FTW edition
  • i5 2550k
  • 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 mhz
  • MSI Z77A-G41
  • 250 GB SSD for OS and apps
  • 150 GB SSD for apps
  • 3 TB 5400 rpm for storage
  • 500 GB 7200 rpm for media prod work
  • 900w Antec PSU

Okay, so I'm an artist/designer. I work with digital media, and know a little code, and build my own computers, but I am by no means a terminal savvy code wiz. I wanted to try out using some recent neural network projects from GitHub for some art projects, but they've only been built for Unix, so I decided to make a persistent USB drive.

I made one, but the maximum storage you can give it, with casper-rw, is 4 gigs. The neural network takes up about 6 gigs of space, so I needed to make a larger size. I tried expanding the size using gpart, but ran into some problems. So I decided to just start over, format es4 and just do a full install on the USB drive. I tried this, and it I got some weird error messages. I did research online and it seems to have something to do with UEFI or something like that? I'm supposed to disable it. But that isn't working. If I disable UEFI I just get a blank black screen with a blinking underscore. If I don't then I get this:

enter image description here

Please ignore the dorky reflection. I did not know any other way to take a screenshot of my tablet monitor while in a boot mode like that.

I was able to get the live cd usb persistent thing working fine, it's this full install on the usb drive that isn't working. I thought about also doing an install on an external usb ssd drive I have, but I'd really prefer if I could get this 32gig flash drive working with a persistent Linux since I have some other things I'd like a portable persistent desktop drive for. Any thoughts?

Byte Commander
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Aslan French
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  • Is your current Windows install UEFI/gpt or BIOS/MBR? You will want to install Ubuntu in the same boot mode as Windows. If installing in UEFI mode to an external or any second drive you do need to partition in advance to make sure you have the ESP - efi system partition. http://askubuntu.com/questions/743095/how-to-prepare-a-disk-on-an-efi-based-pc-for-ubuntu and: http://askubuntu.com/questions/591193/install-ubuntu-alongside-win-8-1-on-separate-physical-drives-and-dual-boot – oldfred Jun 20 '16 at 22:11
  • @oldfred It's UEFI. So that means I need to partition it into two before running the pen installer? Okay, I'll try that. – Aslan French Jun 21 '16 at 04:53
  • ubfan1 has what else you need. External devices only boot from /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi, so you have to copy shimx64.efi into that. But you also have to copy all of /EFI/ubuntu from sda to external device as version of grub/shim you copy only looks for rest of files in /EFI/ubuntu. More info: http://askubuntu.com/questions/740290/installed-ubuntu-15-1-on-usb-full-install-but-it-wont-boot – oldfred Jun 21 '16 at 13:28
  • I will be honest, I don't know what exactly the efi bootx64.efi is etc, so I'm a little lost. Can you break it down for me a little more?

    Also you are saying yes, I do need to partition before installing the drive? I did that and named one drive home-rw, and the other I installed on, and it seemed to work, except now I'm running out of space again when trying to install stuff. What is shimx.efi etc?

     – Aslan French Jun 21 '16 at 17:47
  • Did you click on the link that explains it a bit more? Those are all boot files in the ESP - efi system partition which is how all UEFI systems boot. Partitions were discussed in the first link in first post above, did you review how to manually partition in that link? Even more info: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295 – oldfred Jun 21 '16 at 18:38
  • @oldfred Yeah I clicked the link, and I'd actually seen that thread before, seen a couple of places where you'd commented on other threads while I was searching for answers.

    I don't know what the ESP is, or the efi system partition. I'm sorry, I'm really really unfamilar with Linux. I see the optino to set up an EFI partition when I try and do a full install using the Install Ubuntu tool from a live USB, but I'm trying to change the partition size using this method found here: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-larger-than-4gb-casper-partition/

     – Aslan French Jun 21 '16 at 19:20
  • I don't think I'm even running into an UEFI problem anymore, since I changed the boot priority of my drives, and switched back to the pen driver install utility method. But now I'm having trouble increasing the size of the persistent drive and stuff instead. – Aslan French Jun 21 '16 at 19:21
  • A full install and a persistent install are two totally different things. You add persistence to the installer and that normally has limited size due to installer being FAT32. Full install does not have those limits. – oldfred Jun 21 '16 at 19:40
  • @oldfred Ah yes, sorry, I was being imprecise with my terminology. I went back to trying the persistent install, and tried using the methods of expanding it's persistence drive but seemed to have run into some problems.

    So if I try the full install again, on a usb drive, I need to copy over the entirety of /EFI/ubuntu over to the drive from a seperate full install? If I don't already have a functioning full install, then where can I get those files? and I also need to copy the shimx64.efi to /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi, correct? I'm just trying to make sure I am understanding things correctly.

     – Aslan French Jun 21 '16 at 23:56
  • When you do a full UEFI install, grub will install only to the ESP on sda. So you copy from /EFI/ubuntu on sda to /media/$USER/EFI/ubuntu or similar path depending on how you have mounted it. If you do not have an ESP on sda, grub will not install correctly. And the version of grub on live installer is a totally different configuration, not a full grub. – oldfred Jun 22 '16 at 03:49

1 Answers1

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Which Ubuntu release are we talking about? The Ubuntu 16.04 install media dropped persistence, but an older 14.04 release still has it. If you just made another partition with a FAT filesystem on the install media, labeled it "casper-rw", and edited the grub boot command to add the wrord "persistent" to the linux kernel line, it might work though (never tried it).

The full install probably needs an EFI partition (300M FAT fs, boot flag) to install grub to, although the Ubuntu intaller still ignores the location and puts the Ubuntu bootloaders on the hard disk (and maybe messes up the nvram boot entries too). Lots of answers posted about just copying all the hard disk's EFI directories/files to the USB, then copying /EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi and shimx64.efi to /EFI/Boot and rename shimx64.efi to bootx64.efi.

ubfan1
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