Hello all,

I have a 64 Gb flash drive 3.0 upon which I have installed Linux Mint 17 Mate (I guess; it's really a remix). I partitioned it as I would an internal hard drive with a swap partition, and root, and home as ext4 fs. I didn't make it using startup disk creator because it only provides for an 8 Gb persistence file while I have 64 Gb to work with.

Is my Mint install on the flash drive just fine as it is or do I need to redo it as FAT32? Another question is can I reinstall Mint using startup disk creator without separate root and home partitions and still have plenty of room to be able to store stuff not including the persistence file? I recall start up disk creator as using a FAT32 format.

I don't presently have a computer. I'd planned to carry my own os with me to public computers (and reboot). I did the install on a friend's laptop. The laptop is dual booting Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 Grub menu (on the flash drive) lists Windows and Linux Mint and worked in the normal manner. When I took the flash drive out, the laptop boots normally. So far, I haven't the opportunity to boot the flash drive Mint on any public computers. I'm assuming it works as I intended it to.

My buddy with the laptop (btw, I installed the two Windows OSes and then afterward did my flash drive) has brought me another computer to install software on. It's a 12 year-old eMachines T2200.

So far, my flash drive hasn't booted on the eMachines. I don't know if the computer is too old to boot from usb or if perhaps I should formatted it as FAT32. Having googled this topic, I'm of the understanding that the problem could be that I just haven't discovered what the machine's bios is calling the flash drive and it may be that I just need to explore all the possibilities. I don't presently have internet service so where I'm at doing the googling isn't where the computer is at.

As always, any valid help or suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks

I don't know what you have actually.

Best way to make a usb is this.

Remove internal hard drive or power/data.

Boot to dvd or cd.

Install the OS to the usb just as if it were a hard drive.

The usb is a SCSI device to linux(modern linux). It is usually a hard drive choice in bios. They haven't be usb choices in a while.

From my understanding of your post you have installed a distro onto a USB3 pendrive via a Windows machine.
USB3 sockets are still not very common, most machines have USB2, and they are seldom compatible.
It certainly won't boot up on a machine that has not had its BIOS set to boot from usb devices, whether usb3 or usb2.
If you want a live distro, best use a live distro.

If you plan to use the 32GB flash with Mint as a Live CD with persistence, you will be limited to a 4GB persistence file. If you use a Linux filesystem, it can be larger.

If the computer in question is 12 years old, it most likely will not boot a usb.

I believe the PLOP boot loader can be used to boot from USB on a PC whose BIOS does not support this feature, but I haven't tried this personally - I installed PLOP using the Windows BOOTICE utility, which is quite friendly.

As for the USB 2/3 issue, I was under the impression that USB 3 was backwards compatible with USB 2, so I don't think that should be a problem - you just won't be able to take advantage fully of the increased performance.

HTH,

3g

Not all devices are backwards compatible.

That will work just fine.
The only problem is that flash drives, with frequent writes, will wear out faster than hard drives or SSD drive. An external hard drive would work better, longer.
PLOP should work on the old computer. It will not work on newer computers because it is not compatible with SATA CD drives.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/faq.html

Thanks to all. Your replies are appreciated.