Re: Debian 11 Live USB with persistence?
Hi,
> The sparse instructions at
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/LiveUsbPersistence result in a stick
> that doesn't boot.
Maybe your question finds better experts at the debian-live mailing list.
Said that, some background info and a link to proposals at stackexchange:
The described procedure seems to exploit an inofficial behavior of EFI
which is said to be instigated by Microsoft. EFI boots from arbitrary
FAT partitions if only a standard boot file name like /EFI/boot/bootx64.efi
is found in there.
The EFI specs define special partition types for MBR partition table and
GPT to mark the EFI partition. But EFI implementations don't demand these
types.
For legacy BIOS booting there is the need for an MBR which knows what
program of the boot loader to start. The Debian x86 ISOs have such an MBR
which knows the block address of the isolinux.bin program. But it does not
get copied to the USB stick by the 7z run shown in the wiki article.
(Further, isolinux.bin would get a new block address in the FAT filesystem
and thus the unchanged MBR would not find it.)
If you are adventurous, the two answers on
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/118965/how-to-create-a-debian-live-usb-with-persistence
look somewhat plausible.
"Debian live with persistence." by F.Hauri is quite an interesting hack,
whereas "Using mkusb (BIOS/UEFI)" by sudodus is a main use case of "mkusb",
of which sudodus is the developer. He's Ubuntu user and probably willing
to help if you have interesting problems.
mkusb is not in Debian. Of the instructions at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/install-to-debian
i would only be willing to try
"Install dus alias mkusb version 12 from a tarball"
I.e. i would not go the path of PPA installation because of
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian
(sudodus also presents in "Using manual setup (UEFI only)" the procedure of
wiki LiveUsbPersistence as a hack to make the USB stick EFI bootable.)
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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