Hello fellow humans,

I have encountered an error while attempting to convert a formatted flash drive into a bootable medium containing Tails Linux 0.21. I have attempted to make the flash drive bootable by the following means:

1. Formatting the flash drive with a FAT32 filesystem via the "USB Stick Formatter" graphical program available in Linux Mint 16 with the Cinnamon desktop environment, and then writing the Tails ISO image to the flash drive via the USB Image Writer graphical program also in Linux Mint 16.

2. Using Unetbootin (the program available at http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net) to complete the same goal, with the same flash drive and same ISO image.

Both methods claimed success upon completion, but when one attempts to reboot from the flash drive (by pressing the F7 key, which on my system directs the user to the boot medium selection screen), the system either boots from the hard drive (into Linux Mint 16) or hangs indefinitely at a black screen with a blinking white "underscore" symbol. When text is entered in the keyboard, there is no visible change. The only exception to this is when one enters Ctrl-Alt-Delete, which restarts the computer into the BIOS startup screen.

I would like to know what I may be doing wrong in the bootable medium creation process, or else if there is something wrong with the flash drive or BIOS, and if discernible, how to rectify the problem(s).

Any assistance is greatly appreciated,
-Minty

Hi.

I'd try md5 checksum on Tails and different Linuces as a test? Also, use dd (Unix command) for making my bootables.

Good luck and have fun.

1 members found this post helpful.

How do you know your machine is trying to boot from the USB stick? Did you choose it from the BIOS menu or just select "removable media" or similar?
I ask because I've had many a frustrating time before I realised that USB sticks tend to show up as hard drives and so mean changing the boot order to point to hard drive first then changing the hard drive bot order to point to them.

1 members found this post helpful.

I too would recommend trying the dd method. And as for the "boot from USB", on most of my ex-Windows machines the "setup" page doesn't show as much as the "boot menu" page (in one case the key is F10 for setup, Esc for boot: on the boot page it allows a choice of two hard drives, one of which is the USB (easily identified).

Also, with some earlier versions of Unetbootin I had some trouble with permissions.

1 members found this post helpful.

check out this link:

https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/installation/

1 members found this post helpful.

I have attempted the dd method. The result is the same as my previous attempts to make the flash drive bootable.

On system boot, two options are available as keyboard inputs: F2 and F7. F2 accesses the setup for the BIOS. F7 accesses a list of bootable mediums from which one can boot. I have used the latter. No, I didn't select "Removable Media"; I selected "PNY USB 2.0 FD 1100" from the list. This just brings me back to the OS on the hard drive.

Further, the Tails ISO is valid. I checked it.

And, while other Linuxes have booted successfully from the USB in the past, neither Tails nor Liberte Linux, the distros I've tried recently, will boot from USB.

Are your computer specs too old or new

No. The system is a Gazelle Professional version 9 by System76. I just got it in June of this year. There's no UEFI or anything, just a good old BIOS, so SecureBoot isnt the problem. It is capable of booting from USB, as it has done so previously. I suppose its safe to conclude that the problem lies in the flash drive itself- maybe its exceeded it howeve read-write limit (or whatever its called).

Then that is your answer: Tails and Liberte don't boot from USB.

Possibly, I would try other distros on it (although cheep nowadays,) to prove it I'd be interested to hear if Tails Linux 0.21 works for you on another USB as-well?

So, you can't try it on CD or DVD?

1 members found this post helpful.

On the link JJJCR posted, the Boot From USB instructions say it uses the GPT system rather than the MBR. Would that interfere with possible MBR residuals still in the boot sector (1MB) on the USB?

Good call, not if it was fully formatted? I usually leave the drive unpartitioned (all free-space) when I dd or whatever to it...