How to create bootable .iso of my Ubuntu Mate

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi,
Would anyone know how i could create a .iso of my completed install of UM OS which i can then install onto a USB in case of hard drive failure & not have to worry about reinstalling & configuring the software & OS of my present setup.
I’ve already tried Systemback which i managed to make & install the .iso onto the USB but after i installed it on the HDD it did not boot & got an error message :

“(initramfs) mount mounting /dev/loop0 on filesystem.squashfs failed: Input/Output error
Cannot mount /dev/loop0 (/cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs on // filesystem.squashfs”

Your help would be appreciated.

kind regards

Dave

2

Hello

How to create a .iso?

Or maybe just clone it with something like Clonezilla.

1 Like
3

Hi v3xx, thank you for your suggestions but i was trying to avoid the expense of buying another HDD & having the convenience of the USB.
I’ve managed to create the .iso on Systemback, installed it onto a USB using Unetbootin & that actually boots into UM, then i installed UM from the USB onto the HDD using Systemback & Unetbootin but the HDD will not boot into UM. I thought it may be the HDD so i formatted it & installed Zorin 12 which booted with no problems, so nothing wrong with the HDD.

4

Have you tried using gnome disks? I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with UnetBootin.

Open gnome disks, goto the hamburg menu, top right and choose ‘restore disk image’ choose your iso and then click restore that will make a bootable disk from your iso.

5

Thank you for your suggestion much appreciated but unfortunately still the same result im able to install .iso to the USB & it boots up fine but unable to get OS installed from USB onto HDD to Boot.

6

You sound like a person who values the work he’s done and doesn’t want to lose it. Maybe i can help with that by relating some of my experiences in that area, since it’s also important to me.

When i first came to linux the distro that i landed on was Ubuntu 11.10. That was… i think it was the last version that came with the gnome-2 panel setup, or maybe the first one that made Unity the default.

Anyway at that time, maybe 5 years ago now, there was a utility that a guy (Tony somebody?) had written, and what it did was inhale your working partition and spit out an iso file. I forget the name of it, but i used it for a year or two.

The problem with using an iso file as your primary system backup is that then you have to boot into it before you can restore from it by installing from it, and basically you end up waiting a lot while files are copied and restored.

And the really bad thing about that, in addition to being slow, is how are you gonna be sure it’s a valid backup if you don’t restore from it?

For various reasons i decided that using an iso might be okay for distributing a copy of your system, but not so great for backups. So i built a utility called partitionBackup, which is basically a text-mode-fullscreen interface that makes it convenient to create rsync commands, and perform actual backups, without having to remember a lot of syntax and figure out whether you want to back up /sda4 or /sda14 or whatever.

So what i keep on a usb stick carried in my pocket (which has become a microSD card over time) is bootable into several distros that i’m working with ATM, and which also contains a copy of all my working data. I find that this works way better than trying to generate an iso image, and is a lot less hassle.

Dunno if that information helps or not. I’m willing to share what i’ve built, but it’s written in PHP-5 and relies on ncurses.so to perform its fullscreen text mode schtick, and i haven’t found a way of getting ncurses installed with the PHP-7 that is in the repository. As a result, i’m still booting into debian-jessie to perform backups, which is something i’ll need to deal with somehow.

Good luck, hth.

7

Hi, thank you for your very interesting reply unfortunately some of what you mentioned is a bit out of my league, but if i can pick up on what you said in your 6th paragraph regarding “distributing copies of my customized system” this is exactly what im trying to achieve as in, installing my customized copy of UM
onto my other laptops & desktop without the expense of purchasing larger hybrid HDD’s which i use all the time & going through the process of cloning.

i’ve managed to install the customized UM onto a USB flash drive using Systemback to create the .iso & Unetbootin to create the bootable flash drive which boots up fine, but when i install UM from the flash drive to an HDD all i get is this error:

“(initramfs) mount mounting /dev/loop0 on filesystem.squashfs failed: Input/Output error
Cannot mount /dev/loop0 (/cdrom/casper/filesystem.squashfs on // filesystem.squashfs”

Once again thanks for your help much appreciated.

8

In thinking about this, what i find is that without the crappy utilities i built years ago using PHP and ncurses, i’d have some trouble with this too. I dug around and remembered the name of the utility that i used to use before building my own, “remastersys” was the name of it, and it worked pretty well a few years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remastersys

9

Yeah apparently Remastersys wasn’t maintained but eventually another group took it over, redeveloped it & reissued it under Pinguy Builder which i tried but i couldn’t even get to the stage of a bootable flash drive, not sure if i was doing something wrong or if it was the software, got closer to what i was aiming for with Systemback.

Cheers though.

10

I haven’t tried it yet but I found this program called systemback @ https://www.unixmen.com/systemback-restore-linux-system-previous-state/

It is suppose to make an iso among other things.

11

Thank you for the tip, @Don_in_Vermont, Systemback looks promising. Will try to find time this weekend to test it - both the backup / restore and ISO creation.

Regarding ISO creation on Ubuntu MATE: there seems to be a bug (or a feature) resulting in an image that doesn’t work. Replacing casper with live-boot fixes things?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/systemback/+bug/1648154

12

Thanks Don_in_Vermont but as you might of read in my previous posts i’ve already tried Systemback.

Cheers though.

13

Hi samuvuo thanks for your post would you care to elaborate on how to replace casper with live-boot because it seems like the problem i’m having is a boot one.

Would be appreciated.

14

That advice was in relation to Systemback, mentioned in comment #1 of the bug report as a (possible) solution. I have not tested this myself yet and, needless to say, it won’t help with applications that rely on casper.

2 commands in terminal:

sudo apt-get install live-boot
sudo apt-get remove casper

Then create a new Live image and try to boot it.

15

@davson723

I have used a systemback usb key to reinstall MATE 16.04 several times. The creation of the live image and the conversion/copy of that image to an iso is fairly straightforward. The installation of the backed up system starts encouragingly. The first screen lets you name a new user, login name, user password, and host name. I used my old stuff. I clicked on >>Next.

Partition Settings. (You may want to make this dialog full screen in order to read the partitions available.) I selected my present installed partition, /dev/sda7, selected my mount point as root ( / ), left format to ext4 checked and then clicked on the left pointing green arrow. The partition appeared under new mounts. The >>Next button also became ungrayed.

I selected the swap partition, I think it was /dev/sda5, selected its mount point as SWAP and clicked on the left pointing green arrow. It appeared in the new mount point column. I could not get my data partition to mount as I wanted so left that to later cleanup. I left Grub2 bootloader as Auto and checked Transfer user configuration and data files. I clicked >>Next.

Systemback. “Install the system using the following restore point: Live Image.” It could have been live image iso i guess. I clicked on Start. Systemback displayed an “installing the system” screenlet. In about two minutes, I saw “The system install is completed.” I clicked OK. A screenlet appeared announcing that the computer would reboot in 30 seconds. When it did, my custom Grub screen appeared and I booted into my system as it was when I had last backed it up.

The system loaded slowly as it was “new”, and my data partition was not mounted so I had to edit fstab. I also had to renew my symlinks to data4. Things went fairly well after that. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them. I’m posting from the “new” installation.

Dave, it looks like your error was due to selecting a cd-rom but of course I wasn’t there. Good luck.

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16

The first time I tried an installation, I was stuck at the Partition Settings screen - I had set the root mount point, but the next button was still grayed out. What I had to do was to click on the green arrow and then I could go on with the installation.

https://answers.launchpad.net/systemback/+question/269061

This ‘answer’ let me actually use the Systemback installer. A lot of the options at this point will really screw things up. Don’t ask me how I know…

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2350609&highlight=systemback &
sudo apt-get install ubiquity-frontend-gtk

I was looking for a recent mention of Systemback in the Ubuntu forums. This thread mentioned installing ubiquity to get another way of installing the iso. Ubiquity worked quite nicely on the live system (System, Administration, Install RELEASE) but ignored my entrance of a different user name, password and hostname which the Systemback install did not. Ubiquity also allowed me to install in a familiar way.