- This topic has 35 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated Aug 14-4:55 am by BobC.
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BobC
Brian,
The purpose of the thread is to get a way that I can store a large number of .iso files of different distros (including primarily antiX) to be able to boot and run live or install any of them very quickly on any of my machines from a high speed, high capacity USB 3.0 SSD drive, which can hold 100 distro/versions and install antiX in under 5 minutes.
No, I don’t WANT to run Rufus, or anything else MS related unless there is something it does that I literally CANNOT do under Linux. Yes, I still have a few MS partitions I could boot if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.
I’m absolutely fed up with the arrogant MS attitude that I am operating my computer for THEIR benefit. After the last go round of buying virtual licenses for Win7 for my Core II sysytems, registering them with MS at the time, and then years later they tell me they are illegal copies, and as such after spending 2 days straight running to install them with all the updates, they then told me to buy new licenses. I was a great customer for them for years, and they made many thousands of dollars off me, but they have screwed me over one time too many. I have had it with the MS nonsense, and will NEVER pay them another penny for anything whatsoever.
My computers are here to do what ***I*** want them to, and if not I will power them down.
Back to the thread purpose… I’m trying to make it quick and easy to setup clean backups (via snapshot and live USB maker) and/or test environments from .iso files that I can load up in a flash as needed…
Brian Masinick
Some of the product tools discussed MIGHT get the job done, but based on what’s already been discussed, they seem to be quirky, not very consistent in their operation, and prone to be unreliable.
I don’t think that creating a big repository of USB ISO images will be easy unless the process is very well understood. Has anyone been successful using any of the commercial tools? I can’t tell from the discussion, but it seems like “no” is the answer.
If appending an image to the existing device is all it takes, it *might* be easy to write a straightforward script that either runs from root or uses sudo rights to access root privileges. If anyone has the time to do this, one suggestion would be to:
A) have the script accept (and verify) two arguments:
1) The input ISO image location
2) The output USB device
B) the script could then
1) switch to root user access
2) verify the location and format of the input image
3) verify the presence of the output device
4) append the ISO image to the output device
5) optionally verify the creation of the latest image
6) optionally list the available images on the output deviceThe more of these options included in the script, the greater the potential of doing it wrong, but if written correctly, it would be a useful and reliable tool, and the author would have a solid understanding of the mechanics of the device, organization of the files and the technical details.
If I get any useful time, I may write a tool myself, but I do not currently have a large enough USB device to hold hundreds of images. I may, however, be able to append 3-4 images and again, if time permits, I may give this a try. IFF (if and only if) successful, I will happily share any simple code, with the caveat that anyone using it must take their own responsibility to understand and use it properly; otherwise such a tool could (when not used correctly, ERASE instead of APPEND new images correctly).
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Brian MasinickBrian,
Thanks for your input. The Ventoy is doing pretty well, now that I got past the install and reliability of writing issues. Admittedly I got past that by installing from Debian, but my main antiX system has a lot of additional packages which could be causing the problems, so it may not really be a problem on stock antiX.
Copying .iso files to the Ventoy could not be easier. Once I setup the mount with the right authority, I was able to copy files via mc, Spacefm, or even by directly downloading via torrent into subdirectories. They all come up on the boot list and they are lightning fast from SSD.
I am now going through each of my machines and consolidating all of my .iso files onto this drive.
The script needed:
What I need is an automatic install script for antiX. I have the feeling this already exists, somehow, somewhere, and maybe if I can find one, I can tweak it. Still need to play with persistence. That would be great to be able to use for testing sometimes.Brian Masinick
I already ran a search and found each of the tools that people have wrote about here.
I’ll try a few more searches – and I can poke around in the days ahead – to see if anyone else has written any scripts that can be freely used (and visibly examined) to see how these techniques have been implemented.
However Ventoy works, it must be some kind of large file system or container that accepts input sources (and if it’s “smart”, evaluates those sources to make sure they are “supported” by the tool), then adds the next source to the list of items in the collection. If they are all ISO images or other valid computer system formats that it recognizes, it also provides some mechanisms to choose from them, so that you can either access one of them or run it live.
There is certainly more than one way to do this (and I imagine theirs is “proprietary”). If it works, that’s great. For me, without getting into either the code or the product description, I have no idea how they actually implement their solution, but it has to be something that maintains the integrity of the installable, boot-able instance.
Glad it works for you! 🙂
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Brian MasinickBrian Masinick
I took a quick look at the Ventoy tool and it is indeed a convenient tool, similar in basic organization to the outline I created a few posts back, but with a few additional additions that can be potentially very helpful. The difficulties that Ventoy can potentially encounter with a very large space of ISO images is a common one; their suggestions and work around ideas are quite solid, so if this approach works for you, I’d say it is consistent with “best practices”. I hope that it works out well for you; it looks to be as good or better than any other tools or scripts you could write because most of the basics are there, even some work around approaches to overcome file system limitations. If you create a very large repository of images, recognize that the likelihood of some of the images NOT being easy to access or retrieve may be reduced, but if you carefully follow their recommendations, the worst case is that you could extract one of those images to another media source to use or extract them in the “out of bounds” case – at least in theory!
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Brian MasinickVentoy is better than the others in that it’s open source, and creates a setup that allows you to load any supported .iso from a normal drive. So far I have one that comes up saying it’s unsupported. My respins of antiX come up as supported, but I haven’t tested them, yet.
I have found one system that can bring up the Ventoy boot system, but can’t actually bring up the OS’s to boot them, so it’s not flawless, but at least they seem to have a good concept.
When they say unsupported, they mean impossible. Feren OS is one of those. antiX 19 respins worked fine. Having problems with elive, but not sure if it is Ventoy or elive that is the problem.
PS elive was just trouble. running alone it took 20 minutes to boot because i had to install nvidia proprietary stuff just to get running. someone without nvidia graphics would be in much better shape. maybe it would have worked from Ventoy.
bodhi had trouble too. I am able to download to the SSD and use live usb maker to separate make a flashdrive off the SSD, so I can still work with it. I was able to do that and install it from flashdrive, After working with it a bit, I can see some differences, but not so sure they are good, just more consistent with phone apps. LOL, maybe antiX needs a “Apps mode” where everything works like phone apps? I probably wouldn’t like it myself.
- This reply was modified 2 years, 9 months ago by BobC.
PDP-8
Hi Bob – glad to see you are making progress..
To be sure, like Brian says, this is a tool of convenience, and not a recommendation for antiX or MXlinux to change their norms of operation. As a relatively recent project, it looks like they are adding distros quite frequently. Note that my interest was solely to play with AntiX and MXlinux and a small handful of others. So as always, ymmv when it comes to 3rd party booters and support. Normally I have no need for multibooters.
Both antiX and MXlinux work beautifully from their iso’s for me in a non-multiboot situation on relatively modern hardware as is. And of course being a usb stick persistence guy, their tools are second to none! Not to mention remastering, live snapshots – the whole 9 yards. My jaw drops every time I use either one.
Re – Windows utils.. I know where you are coming from, but perhaps you may be called upon to help out some that are not as well enlightened. This case for example:
“Hey Bob – I just used my 256gb card a few times, and now Windows wants me to reformat it, but when I do, it is only a 2gb card!” Heh, the standard windows formatter is fooled.
RUFUS, however, digs DEEPER than the standard Windows formatter to find out the true capacity, and when using Rufus to format as “non bootable” instead of doing iso work, the stick is back to normal. Friend buys you a beer. 🙂
Realize that sticks and cards are only targeted towards Windows / Mac primarily, even though Linux can certainly use them, there are some tricks like the above when it comes to SD cards! (maybe especially important if you use Rasberry Pi’s, or other sbc’s with sd-cards the seemingly get corrupted.)
One oft recommended tool is from the guys who set the standard in the first place, the SD-Card Association – they provide a tool that goes beyond Windows / Mac / linux formatters since it can actually reprogram the internal chip controllers! Linux has no access to that:
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/
Unfortunately, no direct linux support. But hey, only this tool will correct faulty controllers, in addition to just filesystems. So there’s that.
Just saying – it’s an option for those who see a use for it.
Yes, tools are good to have when needed, if they work right…
The way I used to try/test was I have a bunch of 2 to 16 gb flashdrives, and I would download, then load onto the flashdrive, clear a partition, and then boot the flashdrive and install to that partition. The problems are that you forget what was in what partition and whether it was something worth keeping, as well as forgetting what was on each flashdrive. This results in a wild hunt every time I want to test something, or using my main systems to test, sometimes resulting in tragic failures.
Yes, I have Rufus and SD formatting programs on my Windows machines, and if I was to get really desperate, I would use them if it would help.
Ventoy is the best of the group here. Its not perfect, but definitely will help reduce my troubles and make it easier and more reliable to quickly setup for a good test.
I couldn’t get anything to work. I spent too many hours/days trying. I had a few successful boots with Ventoy, but can’t seem to figure out why things worked vs what didn’t. The Exfmt is a nightmare for antiX. Automount can’t be left on. NTFS is trouble for many. So you end up with no easy way to mount the drive. Automount needs to be off. Nothing can mount the drive. But the worst problem is that no matter what format, most of the time you can’t boot from the ISO, even though usually the boot screen comes up. It always has problems finding the pieces of the OS itself half way through booting, and ends up on an initramfs error where it can’t find the medium. I tried Ext2, Ext4 and NTFS as well as Exfat.
That’s enough. I’m too exhausted from brain drain at work anyway.
It was a nice idea, but not ready for prime time.
Brian Masinick
I’m going to try out Ventoy, but I’m not going to actively pursue this project, though if an effort does emerge, I may have some time to assist with testing.
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Brian MasinickI found that there are some distros that do work on Exfat which is what ventoy creates as it’s default.
And some distros that don’t work on Exfat. And of the ones that don’t work on Exfat, some of them do work on Ext2.
The most common problem is that it is able to find the .iso and pop up it’s boot options, but then when it tries to boot, it can’t find something that it expected to find, and the boot fails.
On my machines I have troubles with mounting the ventoy partition. Automount causes troble. Adding to fstab causes trouble. Basically everything is trouble. It has to do with something else that I have installed, I think.
Brian Masinick
Your thoughts on this matter are probably pretty close to what is going on.
When I work with Ventoy I will see if I can find a pattern of behavior.
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Brian MasinickBrian Masinick
https://www.funkyspacemonkey.com/how-to-create-a-multi-iso-bootable-flash-drive
shows the basics to running Ventoy.Debian, antiX, and MX Linux are included in the list of supported distros, so that is a good start for me!
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Brian MasinickYes, the way that site shows will work as long as you have automount off so it doesn’t get in the way, and the distro being loaded is happy booting from an Exfat partition.
I think using an Ext2 partition to run from instead solves the problem for many, but for example antiX persistence cannot be saved to an Ext2 partition, so there are limiting factors as a result.
The Slacko Pup Linux distros still can’t find their .sfs files even using Ext2.
I am making better progress now having taken the distro’s that can’t boot from Exfat onto a separate flashdrive with the Exfat partition replaced with an Ext2 partition. This is less convenient than having them all on one, but at least it’s a workaround option.
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