[19.10] Make a Ubuntu-MATE USB thumb drive using latest .ISO

DLS · 15 November 2019 21:09

Hello UM Community,

I am trying to accomplish a very common task yet my need seems to be so much obscure given the total lack of documentation and KBs to be found online! What I am trying to do is restore the latest UM .ISO onto a USB thumb drive and use it as a perpetual live system but doing so while keeping all of my drive space use-able.

To explain my problem differently: The UM .ISO is around 2Gbs while my USB thumb drive is 32Gbs. When I DD the .ISO file over my USB drive, I end up with 1 big partition of 2Gbs with the UM installation on it but all of the other 30Gbs are gone/unusable.

I am aware of the many cloning solutions such as: dd, clonezilla, rear, ddrescue and dcfldd yet none of them seem to fix my problem as they all "eat" the extra space out without leaving any traces (or simply do not support "from: ISO to: bigger drive".

The saddest part is that using previous systems all I did was:

$ sudo ddrescue -v ./ubuntu-mate-19.10-desktop-amd64.iso /dev/sda --force

Then I could resize using gparted.

Now, running 19.10 with latest everything, if I execute that same command and run gparted then it fails to recognize any available freespace. Furthermore, all of the options to resize the USB partitions are greyed out from gparted.

I vividly remember resizing smaller NTFS from 1x smaller hard drive onto another big one, then booting w/ gparted, resizing and voilà all of the space was available but now with this very simple and minimal setup I do not know why it is giving me so much grief.

Any ideas please?

mikeroyal · 16 November 2019 00:46

I would just use Etcher @DLS.

DLS · 16 November 2019 02:05

Thanks a bunch for making me discover a new tool. However, sadly, the end result is the same.

mdooley · 16 November 2019 04:58

It sounds like you want a persistent live USB. Take a look here and try mkusb.

I just used this utility to create a live USB that looks like the following according to GParted:

I think that this is what you are looking for DLS. Good luck.

alpinejohn · 16 November 2019 05:56

Hello DLS

Dolphin Oracle of the MX Linux project has some news that might interest you - see Destination Linux episode 146 (the link takes you directly to the relevant part):

So, they are trying to develop an Appimage to do just what you want (if I understood your requirement correctly).

DLS · 16 November 2019 16:34

BINGO! That's exactly what I was looking for.

And while I have this thread going on let's push this into next level: would anybody knows anything similar but for numerous ISOs? I understand that this tool is mostly/only based around on Ubuntu and that's fine but I also have the need to create myself a "guerilla" USB drive hosting several different flavors using YUMI alongside that other windoze stuff but nothing ended up working. I actually was at the point of calculating each sizes, create according partitions, dd 1 onto each partition and then mesh in grub into all of that but I ended up abandoning.

Did anything more simpler and up-to-date like mkusb exists right now?

Cheers guys!

mdooley · 16 November 2019 21:26

I looked and found another utility that boots multiple iso's and also provides persistence. I used MultiBootUSB to install three isos of which I've only had the time to verify two, 16.04 and 18.04.3. The 19.10 iso wasn't recognized as a ubuntu iso (probably because of its size) and did not offer the ability for persistence. I installed a wireless driver, changed the panel interface and the desktop background for each and it saved my changes.

and a download page:

where I downloaded and installed
python3-multibootusb_9.2.0-1_all.deb

Its worth a shot DLS.

Edit: A couple of days later after going down several rabbit holes experimenting with different methods of getting 19.10 to work on the multiple USB, I'm done. I have a persistent live USB of UM 19.10 which works superbly and I will leave it at that. See my previous post on Unetbootin -