To start with here are my specs:
- 970 FTW edition
- i5 2550k
- 8 gigs of DDR3 1600 mhz
- MSI Z77A-G41
- 250 GB SSD for OS and apps
- 150 GB SSD for apps
- 3 TB 5400 rpm for storage
- 500 GB 7200 rpm for media prod work
- 900w Antec PSU
Okay, so I'm an artist/designer. I work with digital media, and know a little code, and build my own computers, but I am by no means a terminal savvy code wiz. I wanted to try out using some recent neural network projects from GitHub for some art projects, but they've only been built for Unix, so I decided to make a persistent USB drive.
I made one, but the maximum storage you can give it, with casper-rw, is 4 gigs. The neural network takes up about 6 gigs of space, so I needed to make a larger size. I tried expanding the size using gpart, but ran into some problems. So I decided to just start over, format es4 and just do a full install on the USB drive. I tried this, and it I got some weird error messages. I did research online and it seems to have something to do with UEFI or something like that? I'm supposed to disable it. But that isn't working. If I disable UEFI I just get a blank black screen with a blinking underscore. If I don't then I get this:
Please ignore the dorky reflection. I did not know any other way to take a screenshot of my tablet monitor while in a boot mode like that.
I was able to get the live cd usb persistent thing working fine, it's this full install on the usb drive that isn't working. I thought about also doing an install on an external usb ssd drive I have, but I'd really prefer if I could get this 32gig flash drive working with a persistent Linux since I have some other things I'd like a portable persistent desktop drive for. Any thoughts?
Which Ubuntu release are we talking about? The Ubuntu 16.04 install media dropped persistence, but an older 14.04 release still has it. If you just made another partition with a FAT filesystem on the install media, labeled it "casper-rw", and edited the grub boot command to add the wrord "persistent" to the linux kernel line, it might work though (never tried it).
The full install probably needs an EFI partition (300M FAT fs, boot flag) to install grub to, although the Ubuntu intaller still ignores the location and puts the Ubuntu bootloaders on the hard disk (and maybe messes up the nvram boot entries too). Lots of answers posted about just copying all the hard disk's EFI directories/files to the USB, then copying /EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi and shimx64.efi to /EFI/Boot and rename shimx64.efi to bootx64.efi.