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I wrote to a usb stick debian 8.6.0 with persistence it,worked perfectly on my
laptop which is 100% linux,debian and mint.
I inserted it into my wife's laptop which is windows 8 ,it worked but when I re-inserted it into my laptop it failed to boot.On investigation I found in gparted that the fat32 section was blacked out.
Has anyone any suggestions as to how this happened and how I can prevent
this happening in the future.
What do you mean by it worked in your wife's laptop? It booted successfully, or you were able to view the files from Windows? You only state you inserted the drive into the laptop with no further detail.
Was Windows running at the time you inserted the drive? The only thing I can figure if so, is that Windows detected "errors" in the filesystem and attempted to correct them, and therefore borked the filesystem.
Thank you for your replies.
I went into the boot menu of the windows 8 laptop and enabled the laptop to recognise the usb stick and therefore
it booted into debian 8.6.0 and was able access the internet, write files etc. I shut down the laptop and removed
the usb stick.
I then inserted the usb stick into my laptop and it failed to boot I was was presented with a totally blank screen.
I then booted into the main system on my hard drive and opened gparted, instead of the usual green coloured fat32 of
the first partition I had a black partition,the second ext4 partition(persistence) was its normal blue colour.
looks like windows (re)formatted that pendrive. Probably. I guess you executed something on windows which destroyed the original content. But I'm not really sure about that.
Being that the second partition was untouched, I'm going to say that Windows detected what it thought was errors in the fat32 partition and corrected them to its liking. Then when you booted Debian it may have done the same - fixed errors to its liking (been there, done that, but fortunately not with the results you got). Somewhere along the way the fat got messed up.
If you use fdisk, what does it show for the partitions? Is the first still properly identified as a fat32 type partition?
Was the persistent partition only for /home, or for the root filesystem? If the latter, maybe you're lucky enough that the logs will give you some clue.
Is there anything you need on that fat32 partition? It really should be only the system stuff (bootloader, the squashfs live image), and so the easiest thing to do really would be back up that persistent partition and rewrite the live image.
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