Fedora Live on USB Boot Problems

[wesley.bunton]

I'm new to linux, and I used the usb creator and the F9 i686 live cd image to make a usb drive. I am booting it onto a Dell Latitude D820 with 2gigs Memory, nVidia Quadro onboard, and a 1.8 Intel (dual core). At first it works wonderfully (with some small exceptions with the desktop effects and things like that).

I can even update it, and reboot and it works well for a while. Then at some point when I try to boot from the usb drive again, it will start to give me an error message that I do not understand since i'm new to linux. I can't seem to do anything except format my usb drive and start again. The message is:

"Bug found in init. Dropping to a shell. Good Luck!"

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks.

[bwiebe]

I have the same issue as well with an HP core 2 duo running F9 i686 live on a usb (crucial 8GB usb flash drive).

Seems as though it is one of the updates as it works as long as I don't update it, but as soon as I do, it breaks. I have not narrowed it down yet as to what update, but I don't thing its the xorgs.

[xistent]

I have the same issue, has anyone narrowed it down or found a fix?

[bwiebe]

I have found a bit of a workaround. If you backup the raw files on something else(say you windows drive or other computer), you can try and update fedora one update at a time until you find the one that breaks it. When you do break it, just replace the files and your back to where your started. I would do this to find which update breaks it, but I just don't have the time, I just don't update it right now.

Anyone up for the challenge to find which update breaks it?

[zackf]

I am having the same problem, I have done updates one letter at a time eg

yum update a*

I have narrowed it down to the "L's" so I think it's a lib update that's doing it.

Has anyone found a solution?

This thread is a little old so maybe I'll start a new one if we don't get any hits.

[ryptyde]

Here's my experience and "updating" has always ended with a non-working Live usb. I have found that adding new packages seems to work fine with out updating. If you have noticed that if you update and install a newer kernel it will not be in the boot menu to choose so it really is a waste of time updating the kernel for sure.

One thing that I have done when creating a new LiveUSB and adding new not updated packages and get it working and booting fine is make a back up using "dd" so if/when it fails to boot just copy the back up to the usb drive.

[zackf]

Smart idea,

Can you offer the context you used dd in? I have gotten the live usb installed and wireless and a bunch of goodies working just by installing the packages like you said, so I think I will just stay away from updating anything I don't need.

(I have done things like yum update firefox with no problem, and my comment about the "L"'s was wrong, I messed it up ;-)