I has started doing that as well - on a different thumb drive. But they seemed to take ages to create each time. I could understand the first one taking a long time, but I thought the rest were incremental. When they ran on the install USB itself, they were fairly quick, but the few I put on the backup drive took over an hour each time. But I do agree - keeping them separate is a good idea!
Indeed! I guess once i settle on a more permanent solution rather than the USB thumb drive with won’t last forever, I can do more and have more options.
What I ended up doing - three times - LOL (I guess that definition of insanity - doing the same thing and thinking there’d be a different outcome applies) - is booting into my Macrium rescue thumb drive and then there is a choice to repair the boot. After that, the laptop restarted and all was OK. Then I rolled back to the last working backup so that I got rid of any remnants of the bad boot issues.
Hope to never see that grub rescue thing ever again!
i wasn’t satisfied with just once either. i ran the process again because i wanted to try it with my internal ssd removed. that did the trick for me.
i rebooted with just the usb inserted and it ran mint. i took out the usb and put my internal drive back in and that booted just fine. when i rebooted and wanted to try the usb again (this time with the hard drive installed), i needed to push f12 on my machine for additional boot options. the first time it didn’t see the usb and i had to reboot yet again. the second time the usb was recognized and booted.
i did notice that one change i made the first time i ran the usb didn’t fully take effect the second time i ran it. i changed the screen font scaling to make everything bigger, but it only changed the second time after i opened the settings menu again.
it certainly wasn’t the smooth operation i get from mint from my internal drive. then again i’m not using top of the line usb’s either.
mint took me just under 7 minutes to install in a vm. the usb took just under 46. i booted into my mint 18.3 partition on my internal drive before creating the usb. a timeshift snapshot took 4 minutes. even with the differential between internal and usb, that comes out to about a 26 minute write.
an hour does seem like a bit much, but that may depend on if you are writing to a usb 2 or 3 and whether or not you are using usb ports on the same hub. if you have ports on the side and back it may help to split them up. or try writing to the same usb which you said was faster and then moving the snapshots to the other to see if separating the read/write and write input/output might help.
i did some benchmarking while i was booted into mint with the disks utility and while my usb 3.0 read twice as fast as the 2.0 one, it wrote less than half as fast. lots of factors involved
I think maybe you’ve inspired me to give it one more, different, try. I have an old Vista/Mint dual boot laptop that I want to try using if I can get it up and running. I’m not that concerned with causing an issue with it since Vista is long-unusable - and it was just my Mint test machine a while back. I’m pretty sure it is a BIOS only boot - so that might also eliminate the boot loader issues.
My successful thumb drive install that I am using always boots that way - needs f12 to activate it, and when I do choose it - I can also boot into Windows from the GRUB screen. So far it hasn’t be fluky…
As to Timeshift:
I have only one USB 3.0 port, so I have a 3.0 hub attached. When I was trying Timeshift to backup to another USB 3.0 thumb drive, the install thumb drive and the Timeshift backup thumb drive were attached to that hub - so both were in effect on the same side. I can try your idea of moving one - but the write speed might be what the issue is in any case.
Thanks - will let you know what the Vista machine experiment outcome is if I can get it running.
Can I ask - when you tried the first install - did you go through the “something else” option and there specified the sdc for the bootloader - or did you use the Erase and Install option? I’ve been reading up on the Something Else steps and if the sdc is specified for the boot loader, I still can’t understand why it was installed elsewhere.
I’m going to try to get that Vista machine running and see what I can figure out. It has limited 2.0 USBs so I’ll need to use a hub, and also my Panda wireless adapter that uses a USB. Kind of “cave man” approach, but might work.
i did use the “something else” option since my past experience with erase and install is that it generally aims at the internal drive.
to clarify, my experience on that first run was that the bootloader was installed to sdc. i don’t think i described that part in much detail since other info seemed more pertinent at the time. as long as i had the usb drive in, i got a regular grub menu and was able to choose my internal partitions as well as the usb. it was only when i removed the usb that i was presented with the grub prompt.
my confusion remains (similar to what you are saying) how installing to the usb affected the internal bootloader. if i had been thinking at the time i might have tried to boot from the grub prompt to see what went wrong with my grub configuration file, but i was a bit more focused on bringing my system back up.
OK - a quick update! Finally I had success in getting Mint installed on the SSD. I think it was a case of the Win 7 laptop being “too new” and not having an old enough BIOS to work with the installer. I used that old Vista laptop, my old YUMI installer and the “something else” choice, and after what seemed like forever, it did properly install - GRUB/bootloader on the SSD on sdc - where I told it to go - and no ill effects on the Vista - or now trying it on the Windows laptops.
Whew…I guess maybe the 4th time was the charm! Wish we really could figure out why it acted the way it did, though.
Now “all” I need to do is to get the new install set up the way I want it and I should be good to go.
Glad I found this forum - thanks for all of the input, links and ideas! Very much appreciated!
Main stream Support ended in January 2018 and the extended support is as you state - Extended support for windows 7 with the Service Pack 1 being the last one. There is also an Windows 8.1 Update - although Microsoft are pushing everyone to Windows 10.
Oh and welcome to our community, enjoy your stay with us
you could try using the disks utility to benchmark the different ports and see if that shows a difference. after clicking on additional options benchmark is the last one. once you click on the start benchmark button, there is a checkbox for write-benchmark which should help determine if either port is faster than the other.
Wish we really could figure out why it acted the way it did, though.
