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Gparted Live on uefi machines

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PDP-8:
So Gparted Live is a great utility for making your own TC sticks if you want.  It has a minimal environment, but if you want to nab files with a browser, Netsurf works well enough for convenience.

Some notes: To save anything, one must mount a filesystem first and direct your saved work there.  You have to manually start networking / dhcp, (easy) so just plugging in your ethernet cable is not enough. :)

UEFI / only modern machines: instead of using the ISO, you may find it much easier to boot using only the archived ZIP image instead.  Casual use of the project site kind of leads you towards using the iso, but their ZIP file alternative has a great benefit.  You'll mostly want to use the amd64.zip file, not the iso. 

On a uefi-only machine, all you have to do is unarchive/unzip it to a fat32 thumbdrive.  While there are special exe and sh files to make it bootable after you unarchive it, in many cases that is not even necessary!  Merely unzipping the image to a usb stick is all that is needed for it to be detected and bootable.  You'll have to make that determination if it doesn't work first try and have to use the sh/exe routines because of your hardware.

The documentation for Gparted Live kind of leads you to believe that you *have* to use the special sh/exe routines, but that is NOT mandatory for a lot of the newer boxes. 

That's a huge surprise I first encountered in Porteus on modern boxes.  Now I see that Gparted Live does the same thing.  It's a good reassurance that if you want to build your own 64 bit TC, these options are available.

PDP-8:
I'm so confused since I'm not a boot  expert.

Using just the zip file distribution, (not the iso), unarchived to a fat32 thumbdrive, I let gparted look at itself on the drive.

All gparted shows is one single fat-32 partition.  And only one flag, lba.

That's it!  No esp, no boot flag, not needing to run special exes, or shells, nothing, yet here it is running on any uefi-only machine I throw it at.

It works, but I've got a long road ahead of me trying to figure out how *that* works. 

gadget42:
interested in replicating your experiment. which exact gparted live did you download? thanks!

PDP-8:
Sure - I got it here.  Just be sure to get the ZIP file, not the iso:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/1.3.1-1/

The instructions for it are on the site but use the "MANUAL" method-B which uses the zip file.  All the other methods use the cd-iso.  Method-b from either inside another linux system or windows works fine.

https://gparted.org/liveusb.php

There is some good material in method-b to help ensure it will work.  But if you distill it down, for most, it simply consists of "Unzip the file to your usb-stick.  Reboot". :)  It really is that simple.  For *some*, after the process, they may have to run the exe or sh file on that newly created drive.  I don't.

From Windows, all that was needed was to right-click the zip file, and do an "extract all" to the usb stick.  I don't hang out in windows much, but I tested it with the default unzipper of windows just to make sure.

It may seem like it's taking awhile during the process, but if you look closely, much of that is the squashfs file.

Note: Porteus is similar.  While distributed as an iso, it is merely enough to mount the iso, and simply copy the files to the target thumbdrive.  Their own docs indicate that on uefi machines, the exe and sh files are not necessary, but who reads the usb-install docs? Many members of that community assume that an iso /has/ to be used with dd installers, but that is not true for modern machines.

Much like not reading Bmarkus' helpful doc file for PiCore imploring one to expand the partition, but I digress.  :)

So taking my experience with Porteus' install not needing to use the exe or sh files to make it bootable, I did the same with Gparted Live.  And sure enough, no special routines to make Gparted Live bootable were needed.

There's some very special magic to make this kind of simplicity work, but I can't put my finger on how such a seemingly simple process works, or if there is some sort of design compromize that isn't immediately apparent.

curaga:
This could be explained by your stick not being "clean" - previous experiments may have left a bootloader in the MBR, etc. If you nuke the MBR (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=1) and create fresh partitions, it probably won't boot with just unzipping.

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