[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday May 7, 2017 (Bobbie Sellers)

[Ken Shaffer]

Hi all,
Tom's Dell was having problems with a USB made with a pretty current
​version ​of mkusb.  This same USB boot fine on my Lenovo at home, and
mkusb is the tool I have been recommending for making USB with persistence
these days.  mkusb uses five partitions, and Dell gave three UEFI USB boot
options, so maybe I was just picking the wrong one, but we moved all three
to the beginning of the boot sequence.  The best we could get was an
"unrecognized filesystem" on the attempted boot.  Anyway, the DVD showed up
in the boot sequence when a DVD was present, and that install worked fine.

For those interested, the partitions mkusb creates from an ISO are:
Device        Start      End Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1  13262848 15720447 2457600  1.2G Microsoft basic data (backup and
restore programs for Microsoft stuff?)
/dev/sdc2      2048     4095    2048    1M BIOS boot (A bios boot partition)
/dev/sdc3      4096   253951  249856  122M EFI System (The EFI boot
partition)
/dev/sdc4    253952  3435546 3181595  1.5G Linux filesystem (iso9660, the
ISO)
/dev/sdc5   3435547 13262847 9827301  4.7G Linux filesystem  (casper-rw,
the persistence partition)

All the complication was to enable persistence, which is convenient when
you want to install things like wireless passwords.
Persistence used to be offered a few Ubuntu releases back, but broke when
you could no longer use a FAT32 filesystem copy of the ISO.  A link was
added to the iso9660 filesystem, and FAT32 cannot use links.  The link was
used on the kernel boot line, so that caused immediate failure of any
attempted boot.  It is still possible to boot in UEFI mode from a FAT32
filesystem by editing the kernel line, but keeping the  legacy boot is more
work than just a file edit.   Anyway, mkusb solved all those problems, and
I was unaware of any issues with it.
Ken
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