Calamares crashes when installing to a flash drive

So I finally found some time to try to install EOS on a flash drive. I followed the 2 methods that were suggested in my previous thread.

The VirtualBox method didn’t work because VB refused to recognize usb drives (extensions were installed, user was added to the group, logged out, rebooted, nothing worked).

Then I simply booted in EOS live and started the installer. I chose xfce, manually partitioned the flash drive, and selected its MBR (I want legacy mode boot) as the destination for grub. As soon as the installer started working it simply disappeared. The logs show calamares crashed (dumped core).

Here is my log: https://pastebin.com/pSQstqw9

How much RAM does your devicd have?

32 GB

I don’t really recommend installing to thumb drives to run an OS from. It is much better to install it to an external ssd drive. Disable os-prober on the install and you have yourself a fully functional drive that doesn’t affect your installed system.

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I know, but I need a weightless solution for work, so I bought a very small, high-performance flash drive and I’m going to put most stuff on tmpfs in fstab to avoid writing when possible.

USB thumb drive installations don’t work well in my opinion.

Can we get your Calamares log so we can see where it is failing?

Where can I find it?

If Calamares is crashing it is probably sitting in the home directory of the live user.

Ok, here’s the installer log. I repeated the same steps and it crashed the same way as before. I chose manual partitioning for the usb and set 3 partitions: an ext2 for boot, an ext4 with luks, and a ntfs to swap files with windows computers. It appears Calamares always crashes after the luks creation process, as the ntfs partition never gets created on the usb drive.

Can you try again without the ntfs partition this time and see if it makes a difference?

Just leave that space unpartitioned and you can always create that partition after install.

Done. It just finished installing, everything works at it should.

Looks like Calamares doesn’t like windows - I can’t blame it :smile:

Thanks!

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i just try to install on a pendrive and i can not finish install …
in VM bounding in the USB drive, it can start to install but fails on installing bootloader…
booting installer-iso on real hardware and try to install it fails already on creating partitions on the pendrive…
Current Calamares does not seem to be stable for using pendrive as install target ?

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I think i can install it but i just don’t recommend it. I find using an os on a thumb drive to be less than desirable. I lose the rocket feature :rocketa_purple:

aside from that… i would always use something ready to use if I had to use usb-pendrive as OS to boot like slax. Still, it looks like it is challenging depending on the Pendrive even to get it installed… and running it … would need some configurations like may option to copy-to-ram to omit the limitations of read-write speeds on USB thumb-flash-storage…

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