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I'm trying to install Lubuntu 16.10 to run off a USB stick in an HP Proliant Microserver Gen8. I created a Lubuntu (2Gb) USB stick using Rufus and booted from it, then inserted a 2nd USB stick (16Gb) to install onto, and started the installation process. I selected the 16Gb partition to install onto (with an EXT3 partition), clicked OK on all the warnings then selected the option to start the installation. Then.....nothing. The clock span for a few minutes, then disappeared. Task manager is showing 0% CPU usage. I've now repeated this twice and the same thing happened both times. The install seemed to disappear without trace. How can I tell what is happening with the installation process?

user1175461
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  • Did you hashcheck the downloaded ISO and media-check the install USB? Is this a UEFI machine and are you doing a UEFI install? Do you have proprietary video hardware like Nvidia which might need options like "nomodeset"? – ubfan1 Nov 01 '16 at 15:08
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    I now only use gpt partitioning for full installs to flash drives. And have both the ESP for UEFI and bios_grub for BIOS boot. And I use ext4. I used to turn off journal in ext4, but use flash so little I do not now.http://askubuntu.com/questions/743095/how-to-prepare-a-disk-on-an-efi-based-pc-for-ubuntu – oldfred Nov 01 '16 at 15:31

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An Ubuntu installation that gets stuck in the middle is often caused by a defect in the target installation media, in your case the 16GB USB stick. In fact if you try to install Ubuntu again on the same drive, it will often get stuck again at approximately the same stage of the installation process.

Your situation is complicated by the fact that there are USB two flash drives, either of which could be causing the problem. The first step is to run a Lubuntu live session from the 2GB USB flash drive. If the Lubuntu live session runs without any problems, that rules out a possible problem with the 2GB USB flash drive. The next step would be to try repeating the Lubuntu installation on a different 16GB USB flash drive if you have one.

I have posted another answer about how to do a full installation of Ubuntu on a USB flash drive that also may be helpful, especially the four bullet points at the end.

karel
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Thanks for the suggestions - all of which I tried over the course of several hours. None were successful. I then installed a hard drive in the server - not for the purpose of installing Lubuntu onto it - purely for use as a storage device AFTER I'd installed Lubuntu onto the USB stick. This time the installation to USB went through without any problems. So it was the non-existence of any hard disks in the host hardware that seemed to be the problem, even though nothing was being installed to the hard disk itself. ????!!!!

user1175461
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you did not partition the 2 nd usb correctly. I think you should partition that 16 gb stick into two partition ; one as logical swap area having size equal to 1gb approx and other primary partition as ext4.Partition the disk correctly.

Ashim
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  • Swapping on a USB flash drive becomes super slow (seconds-long system freezes slow) and quickly kills your flash drive's life. – karel Nov 01 '16 at 15:07
  • oh did not know that. so whats your solution? – Ashim Nov 01 '16 at 15:15
  • My solution for improving your answer would be to do as oldfred suggested in a comment below the question. Prepare the 16GB flash drive with 3 partitions: root, a 250MB EFI System Partition (ESP) and a 250MB-1GB BIOS boot partition. GPT disk partitioning format is probably the most reliable for this. This way the flash drive will work on both BIOS and UEFI systems. After installing Lubuntu on the 16GB drive, boot to it and install an EFI-mode boot loader/manager like rEFInd in the ESP partition as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi – karel Nov 01 '16 at 17:18