On Sun, May 28, 2023 at 9:17 PM home user <mattisonw@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 3/23/23 1:25 PM, home user wrote:
> While preparing to upgrade to Fedora-37 (planned for mid-April), I noticed that my emergency tools are seriously out of date. Those are memtest, Fedora live, and rescue. memtest was dealt with in a thread earlier this month. Now I'm trying to update my Fedora live USB stick to Fedora-36. I used Fedora Media Writer to do that. I saw no hint of trouble while using that. But when I try to boot up from the stick (USB-3, if that matters), I get varying bad results.
Early USB-3 was problematic. Have you used USB memory sticks before? There have been cheap USB sticks that advertise a much higher
capacity than they actually provide.
Two tries failed to complete the boot. One try appeared to succeed, but I couldn't launch any applications. The applications I tried were Firefox, a terminal, and I don't recall the other. The last application launch attempt locked up the workstation.
>
> This workstation is 10 years old. It uses bios. I've attached a PNG screen capture of what Files says is on the stick at the top level. I do not have a cell phone or camera to capture the boot screen when the boot fails.
>
> Main question:
> How do I make a Fedora-36 USB live stick that really works?
>
> Secondary question:
> I can't find a tool on my workstation to check the stick. Disks, GSmartControl, and Disk Usage Analyzer don't do that, How can I check the stick itself? I actually tried 2 sticks for the Fedora Media Writer. They both failed when trying to boot.
This afternoon (Sun., May 28), I retried Fedora Media Writer and a USB-3.1 stick, this time choosing Fedora-37 Workstation. There were no hints of trouble. But when I tried to boot from that stick, the boot screen sees the stick, but booting from it failed. I don't know how to capture the messages that were displayed.
So I turned to Stan's suggestion in the "/boot problem" thread to try a live DVD. It sure took a while to burn it. It sure took a while to boot it. But it does seem to have worked (one test only).
I'm puzzled and troubled that the USB stick method does not work. Could that have something to do with this being a BIOS rather than a UEFI workstation? But if that were the case, I would expect the DVD approach to also fail. Regardless, I'm glad the DVD method does work (though sure is slow). Since the DVD approach worked, I'm marking this thread SOLVED.
You are lucky to have elderly hardware that still works. I worked in a research lab with equipment controlled
by PC's, so here are several really old PC's doing "mission-critical" tasks running DOS or ancient Windows
versions, and even one Apple Mac Power PC tower and specialized ISA cards.
Having the ability to boot a Live Linux distro (without the hassle of wriing a DVD) is often useful for troubleshooting,
so it would be a good idea to ensure your USB devices work reliably. You can mount the iso Linux
and use cmp to check for files that differ between .iso and USB. You could also find a way to check the
USB key on another system. Many libraries have PC's available to the public -- contact the person who
manages the PC and ask if you could try the Live Distro. There may be a linux users group in your area.
George N. White III
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