If you don't care about the full explanation of how I got into trouble, skip the "Long Story" part and go straight to the "Short Story".

>>> Long Story

A friend of mine have this HP Classmate Notebook and a few days ago asked me for help. His OS (Windows 10) just crashed. So I just bring up my kali live USB and booted from it.

The issue was the hard drive (the SMART test showed it was pretty much dead). So I rescued as many files as I could and offered my friend a live persistent USB as a cheap and quick fix.

I proceeded to make a Debian Live Persistent USB with the instructions of Cityspeak in this forum ( http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=438311 ). The USB stick works just perfect in my own laptop (Lenovo U400) but, for some reason, when I try to boot on my friend's machine the screen just goes black and reboot after I choose the Live option on the menu.

The BIOS/UEFI setup is configured to legacy (BIOS) OS. (For UEFI it won't even make it to the menu).

I know I might just give him a Kali USB, but I think it might be a little intimidating to a linux newcomer. (Yet, I think that's what I'll do if I can't make it work soon).

>>> Short Story

I have a Debian Live Persistent USB which works fine on one machine but not on other.

The "not working" netbook is an HP Classmate Netbook (Product-ID: J1V60AA#ABM) configured to legacy (BIOS).

When I try to boot, I get the menu, but on enter key the machine just reboots (BIOS splash screen and back to the menu, no error message at all). It happens just the same for the failsafe option.

I've booted successfully on the "not working" netbook with a different USB stick (Kali).

Any help will be appreciated.

d3249,

I am not sure if this link is much different to the one you quoted but post #9 seems to have worked for another Debian user:

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=40570

thanks for the answer, but yes, those are the instructions I used to prepare the USB stick.

When you look at bios for hard drive choices do you find this usb?

How do you select the usb to boot? It should be a hard drive order choice. Usually the usb choice fails like that.

I am not a fan of this live to usb creations either. Make a real install to a usb instead.

It may be an issue with video drivers. The HP and yours may have different graphics cards, thus no video on the HP. You can't expect a drive installed on one machine to boot on every machine.

d3249,

I think sgosnell is right. It probably is a graphics driver issue.

Post #21 goes into more detail regarding graphics drivers:

http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=40570

I configured the BIOS to check for USB bootable devices first, that's not the problem, the process goes fine until I have the menu (I'm afraid I was not specific in here, it's the Live - Install - Advaced Install menu, sorry).

About the installation on the USB device, that's new for me, if you point me in the right direction, I'll give it a try.

Yes, I had the idea it was a hardware configuration problem, but I had no idea where to start looking. I'll check the video card on kali and then I'll search for a solution.

Thanks to all, I'll keep you posted

When it comes to multiple drives (booting from usb) you do not want to use /dev/ names in /etc/fstab or /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Use something more like root=UUID= for grub and UUID= for fstab. Or use LABEL(s). And use "blkid" to help identify the value that follows. I tend to just make full installs and default to a non-X environment in case of video driver issues. You can install grub on usb mediums just as if they were any other attached HDD. And you can use a hotkey at boot to bypass most things bios to boot usb first. Which I have to do at every boot on a particular gateway because the bios does not persistently save booting usb as the primary boot option.

That laptop appears to be more likely of a celeron dual core variety with intel HD graphics. Which shouldn't be much of an issue unless there's proprietary nVidia or amd video drivers installed. Before shutting down a usb install to boot it on another machine you might want to "rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules" so when it boots the network devices default to the 0 value (eth0 / wlan0).

Using debootstrap or rsync to create bootable distros is fairly trivial if you've done other CLI only installation methods. And kind of nice as you can use it on other deb based distros and get a useful base install with X at about 1GB of usage. Which can also be a fairly fast install if your internet speeds are not stellar. Although once you install and use a gui web browser that quickly inflates to close to 3GB.

I'd normally agree that video is the issue however it shouldn't have caused it to reboot. That is why I discarded the notion. I guess it could happen.

Not sure I do understand if it gets past grub or not. If you do boot to debian installer then it could be lack of memory.

You still should create a real install to a usb. Debian doesn't know the difference between a usb and internal hard drive on most newish systems.

Video and network issues still plague linux.