Flash Drive Read-only Half Solved

Sorry, but I just have a terrible time getting started in Linux. What I want for the moment (having set up a partition on WinXP and ran a distro before) is a live MINT USB distro on a 64GB stick plugged into a Win7 machine. Since stick is 64GB, I am dealing with exfat. Found Gparted and seems to be okay, but gives an ominous warning about launching the win 32 formatter off of the stick drive and NOT windows (C:\). That part is understood. However I see the prompt "hit any key to format L" and when I look up at the colored title bar of the window, I read cmd: C:\ etc. that makes me wonder am in C: or L: (the USB drive letter). The Gparted iso in resident in L: but the drive needs C: for computing power etc. I know, I'm such a newbie it must be painful for many to read. I just don't want to screw up the MBR of C: In short. Unetbootin, MINT 17 and Gparted are all on L: and unzipped on a exfat USB thumbdrive. I want to fix the exfat to be readable by Unetbootin so I can make a live USB. I might be doing it correctly, but the top bar of the widow reading cmd: c:\etc etc scares me.

I was copying the contents of a flash drive to a folder. In the middle of it I got an error message:

'Error splicing file: input/output error'

and then it said 'do you want to skip or retry?' And the "all" button was there too. Anyway, I skipped. When I checked the folder, all my data seemed to be there.

Do you think it was?

I mean, what are the implications of the error message and of my "skipping" it?

Next up, when I looked at the contents of my flash drive all the folders and files have a lock icon on them. I can open the files but I can't edit them. And no, the lock switch on my flash drive is not pressed.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Using a Kingston 4GB datatraveler for drive creation
Created using amd64 1.1.0a of the Kali ISO verified from Kali.org
Drive created using Ubuntu 14.04 on a Dell Latitude E5500

dd seems to create the drive with no errors. The drive boots to the error. Hard reboot into Ubuntu to search for solution has led me to a long series of issues that I have been trying to correct.

A possible fix for the failed to load error is to copy the file to the root of the USB drive (/dev/sdb1). Drive is created with a hidden HPFS/ NTFS fs. 0x17. Changed FS to HPFS/NTS (0x07). Drive now mounts, but when attempting to copy onto drive, I get an error that the file system is read only.

I try to correct the issue using nautilus and the properties menu. It does not allow me to change the view only to read/write even though it shows me as the owner.

I think maybe a command line thing would work, or who knows what else. Maybe an fstab entry? I am continuing to search the web, and hope to work this out.

Any help would be appreciated.

I keep my Music on a USB flash drive. I do not have room on my laptop to store my mp3 library so this is not an option. Whenever, I remove the flash drive (or restart my computer, i think) my music player (rhythmbox currently) forgets where the music is stored. I have to go through reimporting my whole music library which is time consuming and tedious. I imagine that my music player can't find the files because the flash drive gets mapped to a different mount point or something after restarting or removing the drive.

TL;DR
How can I setup my laptop so that my music player can find my music library on a usb flash drive without needing to constantly re-import my library?

Also, I have the same question to syncing to cloud storage. How can I automatically sync flash storage to the cloud?

Hi guys,

I'm new to this forum and linux too.
I thought of installing a lightweight distro of linux and did some research on the net where I found people recommending Puppy Linux. Plus it is (theoretically speaking) possible to run it from a USB (flash) drive which I decided to try out but it seems like it's not that simple a task as a lot of people (all over the internet) say it is.

What I tried so far is this: installing it into a thumb drive using unetbootin follwing a youtube tutorial (which basically showed how to download an iso of puppy, use unetbootin to make the thumbdrive bootable and install puppy on it). It didn't work. The USB wasn't recognized as a bootable device. I know for sure it can be booted from it since I tried ubuntu from the same USB and the same Laptop (which is able to boot from USB).

I thought that something with the Flash Drive not OK so I tried to use a windows installer to install puppy like other windows programms but this didn't work either. This time Puppy was recognized because there was an option to boot either Puppy or Windows 7 but when I chose to boot from Puppy nothing happens just a screen flash, some letters in the top left corner saying something like NTSC or NTSF (I can't read it properly because it goes away too fast) then after the screen flash the whole thing again (boot from win 7 or Puppy I choose Puppy again the flash... basically a loop).

Any ideas what I'm doing wron or what the problem is?

Thank You for any replies.

Hi, all, I am new to the forum and quite new to Linux, I am running Mint and Kali from a USB drive, all is going well with with the software and I am starting to find my way around it.

So, now to my question, I have 15 machines which all run from a CF card and the card has multiple partitions and is a Windows Embedded XP, not that the operating system makes any difference, I need to upgrade all the CF cards from 2gb to 4gb, so unfortunately Windows isn't an option to use to copy the drives as it doesn't recognise multiple partitions on a removable drive, so I cant just remove the drive, clone it and fit the new one.

What I need is a method of cloning the drive completely with both partitions, I have read about dd but cant seem to see anything about doing this with multiple partitions, as Linux sees it as two drives when I plug it in, how can I use dd or anything else to clone the drive which is bootable and has two partitions?

At some point I would like to automate the process as I could have many of these machines/drives to upgrade, is there a way to write a program that will automatically back up the drives from a USB drive and then reinstall it, I have seen this done before but I am not sure if this method did the whole drive, just the main drive or all partitions?

(BTW I'm running Xubuntu 15.04)

I'm starting to understand Luckybackup. And gold_finger said:

Quote:
Assuming your Xubuntu filesystem is Ext4, example of doing initial backup would be something like this:

* Spare USB with large partition formatted as Ext4 and labeled "BACKUPS"
I know the EXT4 is more friendly to Linux but all my flash drives are FAT32 (and I'll be backing up to those flash drives) and I'd really like to keep them that way (because sometimes I do plug them into Windows machines--and I know FAT32 works with both Windows and Linux). So is there any reason I would have to use Ext4 and not FAT32 in backing up stuff in LuckyBackup?

I confess to great ignorance about the difference between the EXT and FAT formats. Like if I do format a flash drive to EXT 4 and want to plug the flash drive into a Windows computer it just doesn't work? Like, what's the advantage to using EXT4 then if FAT 32 works with Linux and Windows? What are the disadvantages to using EXT4?

Thanks.

Hi all,

I must confess that I haven't posted for more than a year, although I have been reading the emails that your admin staff kindly sends me. I was just about to bother you with a question regarding installing and booting into Linux from a flash drive on laptop with no hard drive in it. However, I just discovered http://www.pendrivelinux.com/, so I'll post my questions there first, since they apparently specialize in this kind of installation. Of course, comments and suggestions here would also be welcome and appreciated.

Thank you,
Bob

I created a persistent USB thumb drive boot with LUKS for drive encryption (250 MB /boot and then 7.5 GB ext3 root). There's no swap partition because this is just to store some private files.

I want to make two or three copies of this thumb drive to store apart in case one gets destroyed/lost.

When I am booted from that thumb drive, can I plug in a same sized drive and just do a

Code:

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc

command to make a copy of itself to another thumb drive without booting to another host OS? This way when I make changes to one (such as to update the OS, apps, or data), I could then just copy the entire thumb drive over to the other two while still booted in the original USB.

Or would I effectively have to shut down, boot to my normal host OS (or other), and then copy the thumb drives when not booted into them.

Alright, I followed this tutorial http://blog.qnology.com/2014/07/hack...nd-mobile.html To install linux on my Pogoplug v4 but when I restarted it just blinked green forever and nothing happened. I figured the OS did not install onto the flash drive and I was correct. I followed these instructions http://archlinuxarm.org/support/reinstallation and formatted the drive, got the correct Debian linux distro and put it on there, then put the drive back into the Pogoplug.

Success! Green light turned steady and the flash drive light flashed. After a few seconds it settled down but occasionally will access the flash drive (indicated by blinking USB light). Only problem is I cannot SSH into the pogoplug anymore. It has an IP address from the router. The router says its attached. But, when I use Putty to SSH into that address I get “Connection refused”

I know this is simple but I am very new to linux.

Thank you