Live USB boot issues

[Rob.P]

Hi. I've been booting live MX Linux USB's with persistence, for a few years now, when they work, they work great. Booting into the Bookworm based MX. I came across an issue, today, even though the very same drive booted with no problems 2 days ago. Two days ago, a bunch of updates were applied, so that may have had something to do with it. I booted the live usb drive, in legacy mode, like always, when the boot options screen comes up, I clicked "custom", then the error "openvt can't execute tsplash not such file or directory". Is there a way to salvage this? Thank you.

[m_pav]

I've had the odd one or two that failed after some of the fairly big updates, and by big, I'm talking DL sizes like 500MB+ and typically, when a third or fourth kernel update is in the mix. I don't recall ever losing one to anything other than updates where a kernel was in the mix, and it was always my own fault because we provide remastering tools on-board for such things as this. Too many changes with too little operational space can lead to failures.

I no longer use regular flash drive for persistence anymore, I always use USB3.2 SSD-Flash drives with a minimum size of 128GB because I find anything less is asking for trouble when a big write may still be sitting in a drives cache (if it has one) when the power is turned off by the host. Such an exit is a surefire way the make a non-booter and with SSD-Flash, the likelihood is significantly less than it would be for regular flash media. One other thing that helps, is to plug a drive into an always-on USB port if your machine has one, but be sure to unplug it not long after the machine powers off.

Question to assist you with moving forward, can you boot the drive without persistence?

[dolphin_oracle]

does it continue to boot up? tsplash is just the textural splash.

enough kernel updates could possibly remove the kernel that the live system is using. might be related. there was a kernel update.

a remaster, then live-usb-kernel-updater may clear things up if its a kernel missmatch.

that is speculation on my part. I've not run across this myself.

[Rob.P]

Yes, there was a kernel update, the 6. something .20 update, from 6.something .18, standard kernel. No, It just stays stuck on the screen with the error. I haven't tried booting without persistence, I'm worried I may lose everything permanently. I still have access to the "live", part, with whatever contents of the folders there are, no access to the browser(firefox) password manager, or bookmarks. Thank you for the ideas.