Hi. I have written a howto on installing GRUB on an USB stick to make it bootable both on UEFI and legacy MBR systems.
It allows to install multiple ISO images of live distros as plain files in an unobtrusive directory while keeping the stick usable to carry around vacation photos, torrents of Baby Yoda or office documents of legal threats. It also has some nice JavaScript to compute the exact commands to type depending on the size of your particular USB stick. I want to share it here, since it can be useful. With USB sticks nowadays being 32, 64, 128 gigaoctets, it becomes increasingly annoying to overwrite one whole just to install or repair a system. http://nsup.org/~george/comp/live_iso_usb/grub_hybrid.html Also, my access to non-Linux systems is limited, and I would appreciate if people could confirm that the resulting USB stick can be used with other systems. With previous iterations, Windows wanted and failed to “format” the drive. Finally, I have tried and failed to configure Debian Live to enable persistence. I want the persistent state to be stored in a file under the boot/ directory of the stick, preferably in a file named debian_persist.img but any name will do. I have tried to generate this file with truncate and mkfs.ext4, then mounted it to create persistence.conf with “/ union” in it, named it boot/persistence, and booted with options “persistence persistence-path=/boot”, but it had no effect, and I do not know where I can find useful diagnostic info to see precisely what is going on. Suggestions would be appreciated, but do not invest too much time in it, as I have not yet done so myself. Regards, -- Nicolas George
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