Install a persistent USB install to NVME drive

[Croton]

Hi all,

after some squabbles with other distro's and my setup, I went the way of configuring everything on a persistent (PERSIST_ALL) USB drive - If something went catastrophically wrong, I simply could decline the persist save and start new. So welcome my perfect MX 19.3 KDE setup including all software I use in full working order.

However I now would like to install exactly the system as it is on the USB drive to the internal drive. Unfortunately I can't really check what will happen if I simply click the Install icon. Right in the beginning the installer attempts to format the harddrive, which even if it's borked (On the disk are approx. 6 bootloaders and it only boots into a Grub rescue prompt) I would only replace with an image of the working Live-System and not with a fresh MX 19.3 install. Simply as I can indirectly boot my old Pop_OS! installation (using the MX Boot Rescue option of the Live-USB ), which allows me to do everything work-related, that otherwise only runs from the persistent and on none of my other machines.

So could anybody advice me what will happen if I install from a persistent USB? Will I keep all my changes and software, or do I get a fresh OS? And if by default I get a fresh OS, is there any way to get the configured live system just running from the NVME drive?

Thank you very much for any kind of help

[BitJam]

The installer can keep all your changes when you do an install. We did this to avoid the problem the installed system not booting even though the live system boots.

You can also get your live system to run from an internal drive (including NVME). This is called a frugal install and you can select this option at boot time. If you are booting legacy it's in with the persistence options. If you are booting UEFI then you need to selection the "Customize" entry or manually add the "menus" cheat. I believe you only need "menus=ps".

I don't remember off the top of my head if the frugal install will copy your persistence files over automatically but if not, it's easy to do that manually after the frugal install. If you have space on your live-usb the you could do a remaster before doing the frugal install which will cause all of your changes to be saved in the linuxfs file which is what gets copied over when you do a frugal install.

Please note that a frugal install does no partitioning or file system creation. We will only do a frugal install to an existing partition. We make no change to the bootloader and we only copy files to a single ("/antiX-Frugal-xxxxxx/") directory on the selected partition.

[fehlix]

So could anybody advice me what will happen if I install from a persistent USB?

to add: In addition to the advised frugal install by BitJam, if you really want to check what you will get after a full entire disk install, you could install - as a kind of dry run - as "full disk" onto USB-key/stick. The installer allows to not only install on internal hd/ssd but also on external removable usb. So you would have an entire full hd-install on a USBstick. It's not what I recommend b/c we have Live-USB-Maker, which is specialized for USB installs. But at least you see what you get before install onto internal hd/ssd.