I have successfully downloaded and installed Mate 18.04.02 on to an SD Card and this boots great and works fine on my RPi3B+. I then tried doing the same thing using a USB stick and it just does not work if I have no SD card plugged in.
I have read everything I can find but still can't make it work. Help
I used etcher on my mac to burn both the SD card and the USB stick if that helps. All the info I can find claims this should work on RPi3B+
Hello,
Same for me, I've tried a lot of versions of Ubuntu Mate, and the only version that worked correctly is this one : "ubuntu-mate-18.04.2-beta&-desktop-armhf=raspi-ext4.img" from compressed file *.7z
I am using Ubuntu 18.04 on my laptop and I have tried Balena Etcher (up to date) as the direct burning software of Ubuntu for different versions of Ubuntu-Mate images, only one was working well directly on my ssd.
After installation, I've installed Zram.
Sorry for the delay in response. I have 18.04 running without issues on a USB drive without an SD card.
If this is still an issue. let's try and work on it.
This is a bit of an overview of the requirements for USB boot from the Raspberry Pi folks.
A 3B+ should work out of the box. However not all USB drives work. I'd try a different USB device and see if that makes a difference.
Here are our methods for creating a bootable USB drive. Please note I have tested the Windows and Linux versions, I do not have the ability to test the MacOS process. If you have access to a Linux box I can recommend using GNOME Disks
Please let me know if this is still an issue for you.