Comment 65 for bug 658865

Hello,

I had the same problem, too, installing Linux Mint 17.2. The
installer just crashed, informing me that it had crashed, and not
giving massively helpful error messages.

I don't like having to trash the contents of a usb stick in order
to install an os, so I have one usb stick created under Linux with
good old grub1 (or grub4dos) on there.

My problem was that I had not copied these directories to the root
of the usb drive:

/preseed
/.disk
/dists
/pool

The whole usb stick is mounted under /cdrom on the resulting live
system, and some or all these directories being in the root
directory seem to be immovable.

It's unfortunate that all these files, only amounting to 8.2MB in
total on Mint 17.2, and 5.6MB on Ubuntu 15.04 can't all be more
portable and placed anywhere. It's unfortunate, too, that after
years of bug reports, the error handling on this is unhelpful. It
seems to be an upstream ubuntu problem, though.

To fix, this is what I did, assuming that the usb stick is mounted
under /usb:

#Mount the iso image as a loopback on /cdrom
mount -o loop linuxmint-17.2-cinnamon-64bit.iso /cdrom

cd /usb
mkdir mint17.2
cd mint17.2
#Copy all CD files to /usb/mint17.2
rsync -avv cdrom/ . --progress

#Now copy the necessary dirs to the root of USB:
cd /usb
rsync -avv /cdrom/preseed /cdrom/.disk /cdrom/dists /cdrom/pool . --progress

My grub1 menu.lst command line is:

title Linux Mint 17.2
kernel /mint17.2/casper/vmlinuz file=/mint17.2/preseed/linuxmint.seed live-media-path=/mint17.2/casper/ ignore_uuid boot=casper ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw splash --
initrd /mint17.2/casper/initrd.lz

The same idea can be used for Ubuntu 15.04.

Grub4dos also works for booting usb sticks.

Cheers,

===Rich