usb stick with persistence won't boot Dell laptop
 

Hello,

I have a usb stick with Debian Squeeze installed. I am unable to boot it with persistence on a Dell Latitude E6410. I just get a blank screen.

I am able to boot without persistence on the laptop and I am able to use the persistence with other computers. Does anyone have any ideas?

Then you borked the persistence deal somehow.

Might try this instead. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/debian-...-from-windows/

Yeah, I used pendrivelinux to create it. The persistence doesn't seem to be borked as it works on other computers, just not on the dell. I thought I needed to enter some esoteric kernel parameter to get it to work. Thanks,

I have been using those instructions and many more for a very long time and never heard of this issue.

I guess it is possible that your ram is not enough. How much ram are you trying this on?

By chance...

I have made myself a persistent USB flash installation of Mint and find that, if I insert it in a USB port of a running system and restart, it will not boot, while if I begin with the system turned off, it boots. Is this perhaps also true in your case?

I would think it is a problem of the BIOS recognizing the boot status of the USB flash, not a problem with the USB installation as such.

Nope.

What tends to happen is bios's see a usb as one of two devices. Most I have seen show usb's as a hard drive but some still see as a usb device. If hard drive then you need to boot from power off in some cases to bios and then select the usb drive above the installed hard drive as first boot device.

Hello,

Not sure if it is a BIOS issue. I was able to boot the disk without persistence. During the boot process it came up with a boot screen. When I would hit the tab key it would allow me to type in kernel parameters. I would type in persistent in order to get the disk to be persistent. If I did not do that, the stick would boot fine. It just wouldn't be persistent.

I tried recreating the usb stick and was able to boot with persistence the first time. However, subsequent reboots didn't work.

I then tried to install linux directly to the stick rather than set up a live persistent environment. This also resulted in booting correctly the first time, without subsequent reboots.

Again, I tried this stick on other computers and it boots fine. At this point, I'm giving up, but I'm just curious as to why this doesn't work only on this laptop. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the laptop as it boots that proprietary os just fine.

Okay, to say that it is not booting is probably not accurate. I do get to the grub screen and it starts the boot process, however the screen goes blank during the boot process. Perhaps it is a video issue...

Are you sure you aren't using grub on your hard drive and not ever booting to the usb disk?

There should be no reason to edit anything on grub.

For grins, try a plop cd or slitaz boot cd. Boot to plop and you should see a menu of which one is usb. Then see if your known working usb stick will work.

Unless you originally started with safe mode or vga parameters the addition of persistence would have no effect.

I still need to know your ram amount. Persistence may not let a smallish ram be functional.

Windows is installed on the laptop's hard drive, there is no grub on the hard drive.

I never heard of plop before, I will check it out.

The laptop has 4GB of RAM. My last laptop had only 2GB and I had no trouble with persistence.

That's another thing. I can only boot the usb stick in safe mode. I think I read somewhere that the dell laptop required the nomodeset parameter in order to boot. That parameter was included in the safe mode, so I added that parameter to the regular mode. However, it still didn't boot correctly, so I just continue to use the safe mode. Would I not be able to use persistence in safe mode?

Thanks...

Then I guess we need to ask what is the difference between safe mode and why the adding of a casper file is stopping it.

At 4 gig ram I can't believe we have an issue. Could it be that the casper file was written not contiguous? I know is dos if you use the /B switch it should try to make it contiguous. Be sure you check that.

Sorry I didn't get this working yet.