Hi everyone, I'm posting here as a last ditch effort to solve a problem which has plagued me off and on for over a year. I'm putting it in this General forum because the identical problem has happened with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, SUSE, Puppy, DSL and others I've forgotten. I have tried all of these and with each, the same problem always returns. This leads me to believe the problem is not distribution specific.

I've tried to do the installs using Unetbootin, LiveUSBcreator, and Startup Disk creator and the Install program from within the distros themselves, regardless of installation method the same problem returns. So I do not think the problem is related to method of installation.

Maybe it's hardware? I've tried a total of four different motherboards, (an MSI, 2 Gigabyte and an Asus) all with updated BIOS, all 4 of which work perfectly fine with normal Linux installations to the HD. I have no troubles running any of the above distros when installed to a hard drive.

The problem comes when I install to a thumb drive. Which thumb drive? Take your pick. I've used Sony, SanDisk, Kingston and a handful of cheaper brands in sizes from 2G up to 16G. The problem always returns regardless of the hardware involved. Therefore I do not think the problem is related to hardware.

Thank you for your patience, now here is the problem. I want a fully functioning installation of Linux on a thumbdrive. (I do not simply want a Live CD copied to a thumbdrive.) This will allow me to make changes to the software/settings and have those changes remain after rebooting. I'm able to do this just fine, and everything works perfectly until the third, fourth, or fifth reboot. At this point I enter my password and my password is no longer accepted. Sometimes the screen flickers a little, sometimes it just reloads the prompt. But it doesn't let me in. At this point it's Game Over. All the hard work installing and tailoring the install is down the drain. Yes, I've searched and found threads of this similar problem. Many of them go back to 2005 or 2006. The vast majority of them are people begging for help, receiving a few suggestions, finding no resolution and then the thread just dies. Honestly I've spent many, many hours following outdated advice that has, on occasion, worked, but only temporarily. The problem always returns. Something is seriously screwed up and I can't be alone.

So here I sit with a brand new 4Gb Sandisk that up until last night had a beautifully running Ubuntu 10.10 installation. And yet, voila, my password is now no longer good enough. It simply will not let me log on. I enter it, hit enter, and the log-in screen simply reloads itself.

So my question is, what have I been doing wrong? I feel like I've tried every possible permutation of every possible variable only to be faced every time with the same exact unsolvable problem! How is that even possible?

I'm open to any suggestions or ridicule. I'm willing to try anything, because if I can't fix it this time, then I'm done for good. Thank you.

Delete My account

I've never run into this problem with Puppy, but I don't use a swap partition. With Fedora and Ubuntu, I find that at some point my persistent storage file fills up, after which the system freezes and I can't reboot (from the thumb drive) without first deleting and recreating the persistent storage file which, of course, destroys all my added settings/files.

Thank you for your responses. I appreciate them both.

Most of the installs that have had this problem were on 2GB and 4GB drives. Do you still think following the above apply?

Delete My account

Thank you Xander.

Do you mean that ALL thumbdrive installs will only be good for a limited number of restarts? Or will an install on an 8 or 16GB drive be usable for a long time?

Delete My account

The casper-rw file is persistent memory which allows one to save settings and installed applications with a live OS. As stated the max size of casper-rw file is 4G. Here is a link to create more storage.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-...per-partition/

For the smaller drives you can resize the casper-rw file if you have the space.

I have a couple of suggestions, but first a couple of questions:

You stated that you want a FULL hard-drive install to USB
So, you also said earlier that you have used different usb installers (Unetbootin,etc) to install various distro's to the usb

The problem is it seems like you are running persistent usb install, which is NOT a FULL hard-drive install to USB. Unetbootin and others simply copy the livecd media to usb, which you stated you do not want?

So, Are you running persistent usb and filling up your persistent file or partition??

Second, you should never put a swap partition on your usb unless you have no other choice.
It will probably shorten the usb life

OK, so please answer those questions and we can get to how to fix everything, etc

If using a persistent usb you need to do some maintenence routinely to stop it from filling up,etc

Thank you all very much. I won't have time until the weekend to give proper replies and answers, so I just wanted to get a quick "Thank You" in in the meantime.