Linux Mint 16 Live CD/USB boots to initramfs with more than one harddisk

[Heinz Wilk]

Downloaded Mint 16 Mate and KDE and created a live system on USB 32 GB stick with mintstick.
I have two HDD in my system: 500 GB data disk without partition table and 128 SSD with Linux Mint 15 Mate.

Booting from USB always (with KDE and Mint) ended with black screen and initramfs prompt.
This problem is reported often in the mint and ubuntu forums, e.g.
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=152239&p=829960#p829960
The workaround given in the post is:

" It looks like the mint installer tries to install from /dev/sdb1 and fails because the USB stick is
present as a different device (because you have multiple disks most likely). When installing, use the tab in the bootscreen on the first linux boot entry instead of booting automatically
You will see the to be insterted kernel boot parameters. Here add the following: LIVEMEDIA=/dev/sdX1 where the X must be substituted by the actual name of your usb device, SO LIVEMEDIA=/dev/sdd1 in my case.
If you don't know what it is, you can either do trial and error (/dev/sdc1, /dev/sdd1, /dev/sde1 etc) or when you get dropped into busybox, run a "dmesg |grep sd" and look for the device which matches your usb size (scroll up with shift-pageup) and use this."

When I applied this (for me LIVEMEDIA=/dev/sdc1) KDE and Mate booted correctly from the USB!

This should be corrected in the iso.

[chemicalfan (mike-lumsden)]

Confirmed by several users in the linked forum post