Bootable Text Editor

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.

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.

Good evening;
Following instructions on-line I attempted to create a bootable USB drive (32GB Sandsik extreme) with Linux 17.1 installed to enable a trial before attempting a permanent install beside windows 7 on a new computer with Win7 prof. installed.

On the usb I see a 4.0 GB area highlighted in G Parted but not accessible from the Linux file manager. This shows up as a ~1.4 GB sub-directory titled casper. and also as 4.0 GB 'file' named casper-rw. Can anyone explain what is the purpose of this sub-directory? The software I used to create the usb bootable drive and install Linux to is 'Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.5.9'. This is a windows executable. My intent was to create a bootable usb drive for Linux that also contained my required hardware drivers, etc. This doesn't appear to be working 100%; although Linux 17.1 boots the nvidia hardware drivers do not appear to be available even though I downloaded these and they are on the same usb. On boot-up a message box indicates that hardware acceleration is not enabled and higher than normal processor usage may occur.

Any assistance / direction, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Regards;
Mike

Hello!

TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.

I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.

So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.

I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.

Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.

In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.

Any advice would be very appreciated.

I am trying to boot Linux Mint from an 8gb Sandisk USB. I changed my boot settings and it boots into what I believe is called grub? I am given two options, Boot Linux Mint, Boot Linux Mint (compatibility mode). When I select either of them all I get is a black screen. I've tried many things to get around this, messing with my graphics card settings (within grub), different USB's (another 8gb and a 32gb), I tried Ubuntu and that just doesn't boot at all I go straight back to my UEFI settings. I'm very new to Linux and I don't just want to hop in, I just want to boot from my USB whenever I want to play around with it. Thank You

Note: I'm running windows 8.1 currently on a ASUS N550JV laptop. I've been using the UUI from Pen Drive Linux.

Hi All,

I recently decided to tryout Linux and dual booted my laptop (originally just had windows 8) with Xubuntu. Now I want to try out Kali Linux. So I downloaded Kali and made a bootable USB, the problem is that when I try to boot from the USB it just brings up the grub menu asking me to select Xubuntu, Windows etc. I've changed the boot menu in the BIOS but that has no effect.

I've tried booting into windows and the restarting by holding shift but when I select the usb option it just says:

"system doesn't have any USB boot option. Please select other boot option in Boot Manager Menu"

and then returns to the grub menu. I don't understand because I used a bootable usb to install xubunto?

I'd be really grateful if anyone can help me out with this!

Thanks

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?

hi All,

i tried to make a bootable linux mint usb. i thought i succeeded but when i pull out the usb and try to boot back into windows i still boot into linux mint. this is probably a stupid question but have installed linux mint over my windows mistakenly.

help....please

Hi all,

As you can probably tell I am new to Linux and new to the forum, I am using Kali and Mint both as live Linux environments on USB drives, all is good and I am finding my way around, the reason for the post is that I need to copy 15 CF cards that have multiple partitions, Windows isn't really an option as it can only see one partition on a removable drive, so here goes with Linux.

The CF cards contain Windows Embedded XP in one partition and a separate partition for user data which isn't protected, not that the contents matter, only the fact that it is bootable with multiple partitions, the object is to upgrade the old 2gb cards to 4gb cards to add an additional program on the embedded drive, but they are both full.

as long as I can copy both partitions over the partition size doesn't matter as I can resize that if necessary, but I need both partitions to copy over to the new drive.

I have read that dd command is the way to go but cant find much on multiple partitions which display in Linux as two drives, so how do I go about this, any pointers

Ideally I would like to automate the process as this is something that we could end up doing on a regular basis, I have seen a USB drive that was plugged into a PC and through a basic GUI allowed you to copy a HDD but I don't know If that would do both partitions, something for the future?

I have multiple computers to install Linux onto.

Some of my computers do not have DVD drives.

I want to boot Linux from C:, not the USB drive.

Do I download the ISO onto a C: drive.
Copy the image to the USB with the image mover.

My confusion is that this all seems to make a boot-able USB drive.

How do I install OpenSuse without having a DVD and end up booting from the C: drive?

Do I first have to boot from the USB?