[conspire] Live Distro on USB

[Dana Goyette]

If your Windows is installed in EFI mode and your Debian or Mint is installed in legacy mode, it makes sense that Grub won’t be able to find the Windws partition.  Even if legacy grub did see the EFI Windows, there’s no way to get back into EFI mode to boot it.

On my own EFI systems, I use “rEFInd” as the boot chooser: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
The ArchLinux wiki gives a really good description of how to install it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/REFInd
Even if you use other distros (see http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/getting.html ), the wiki page is still a useful reference.

I’d suggest using the --usedefault option to install to <EFI System Partition>/EFI/BOOT.  That’s how I do it even on machines that don’t have any issues with the “normal” install technique.  My only gripe with rEFInd: the default grey theme is really ugly, and completely out of place on non-Apple computers.

From: Paul Zander
Sent: Tuesday, March 1, 2016 4:03 PM
To: Conspire List
Subject: Re: [conspire] Live Distro on USB

As Rick said, after changing the BIOS settings to recognize Legacy Boot, I have been able to boot all of the live images I had brought.

Ubuntu and Mint use EFI and would boot with the secure boot active.
Debian live images do not use EFI and only boot after changing the settings.

Just after I had finished trying all of my memory sticks, Jose came along.  He happened to have a USB SSD with an installed version of Linux.  It also booted.  :-)


IMHO, the neatest thing on his drive was an image of Tux dressed in traditional Bolivian clothing.  I tried to find the image on line.  Here are a couple of links, but Jose's picture was better.


http://www.gnu.org/graphics/umsa/together.png
http://juankarlitoz.deviantart.com/art/UBUNTU-BOLIVIA-BRAVE-VERSION-137270279

One last comment.  Since forever, I have use dual-boot so I could run those programs that don't work on Linux.  Neither Mint nor Debian would recognize that there is another OS already installed. Guess I will have to learn VirtualBox.




________________________________
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: conspire at linuxmafia.com 
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2016 1:24 AM
Subject: Re: [conspire] Live Distro on USB


Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> First off, it has been helpful to me to write the several emails,
> because it focused my thinking even without immediate replies.  
[...]

Paul's pondering on this matter, and a couple of small suggestions I
made to test a hypothesis, appear to have solved this mystery.

At the CABAL meeting, Paul and I sat down and entered his Dell laptop's
BIOS.  As I suspected, it was set to have Secure Boot enabled and was 
configured to recognise EFI hardware only.  We experimentally disabled
Secure Boot and enabled 'Legacy boot' settings.  This permitted the Dell
to suddenly boot _any_ of the USB-connectable (flash drives Paul had
written, including those it used to not see as bootable hardware at all.

We also verified that his MS-Windows partition is still willing to boot,
even without Secure Boot enforced by the BIOS.  So, problem solved.



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