[MULTI BOOT] Kubuntu Live on the 5th partition of a pendrive?

[Guest]

Hello,


I have an issue and I went deep to googling, but I found no guideline to this specific issue:


I have an 8 GB pendrive with currently 4 active partitions (1 boot loader to XPEnology, 2 partitions for OpenELEC, 1 for Puppy Linux), all working well. But the main purpose of the PC the pendrive is plugged into is NAS, running XPEnology (Synology system), so I cannot access the HDDs in the PC when booting to OpenELEC - it requires tools for raid (mdadm). The PC's secondary purpose would be HTPC. So I want to deploy a live linux to the 5th partition. I tried Puppy before - no luck with the raid, tried installing Linux Mint - worked, but awfully slow on the pendrive. Tried Kubuntu Live on a separate pendrive - works like a charm, mdadm works also.


So I want to install Kubuntu live system to the named 5th partition with persistance - and I could not find a tool to do this, by NOT spoiling the current setup, so the boot loader should not go to the MBR but rather to sda8.


As of last step I copied the files of the live system from the separate pendrive to the target partition, but I don't know how to install syslinux NOT to the master boot record, but to this 5th partition. Probably without destroying the nice syslinux config files.


Any help, guidance on the installation or idea to achieve the contents of the HDD outside the XPEnology system would be much appreciated.

[SteveRiley]

Ubiquity (the graphical installer inherited from Ubuntu) is probably not smart enough to do what you want, especially given that your pen drive's boot manager is syslinux. An alternative would be to download the Ubuntu server installation; its text-mode installer has an option that allows you to skip the boot manager phase entirely. You'll need to manually edit your syslinux configuration to make it aware of this new installation. Once you boot it, then install Kubuntu from the command line:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

I'm curious...is your pen drive actually MBR? Or is it GPT?

[Guest]

Hello,

Thanks for the tip. Actually I don't want to install Kubuntu, I want to use it as a live system. Previously I just installed to the same partition a Linux Mint, worked well, no problem with the bootloader - but Linux Mint system running on a pendrive is awfully slow. I tried the Kubuntu Live system (from a separate pendrive) - acceptable speed. It's a simple USB 2.0 stick, not a racing car... Anyway in the meantime I was able to get it up and running the way I wanted (except the persistance): I copied the Live files from the separate stick to the target 5th partition, installed grub to the same partition, tweaked a little with the config files and voilá - it booted into Kubuntu Live.

(Just a backgroud, why I need it: the first partition of this stick is a 32 Mbyte one, only purpose is to load the default XPEnology NAS system. Since it is a waste to use an 8 GByte pen to this purpose, plus I needed the media features of the PC sometimes, but the XPEnology occupies the whole HDD - so the sensible way is to use the rest of the pen to store and run the other systems for media purposes. Thus the bootloader on the 1st partition is extended to chainload the other bootloaders on the other partitions.)

Re your question: I guess it is a normal MBR - well, yes, because apart from the 1st partition the others are logical ones, naming sda5 - sda8.

Thank you for your help, in the future I will keep it in mind!