How to install on a 512 MB USB drive?

[Jukka]

Minimum requirements state >= 512 MB USB drive, but in realy the USB write tool will not succeed writing to USB drives less than the exact image size 1048 MB. That makes 1 GB nominal USB drives unsuitable, because they generally have less than 1024 MB of space and the write software will state that write failed.

The actual content on the image is only a few MB, so why not make an image file that allows USB drives of any size larger than the actual minimum that is needed by the software?
Whatever stupid reasons there are to use 1048 MB image file, please reduce the size. If I'm going to overwrite all data on a drive to make a bootable USB donge, I'm not going to use it to store my family album anyway.........

[David (PassMark)]

Treat yourself. You can buy a brand name 8GB Flash drive for $3.
No one makes 1G drives anymore. The plastic case would cost more than the electronics. So it doesn't make sense.

There needs to be some free space on the drive to write the test reports and log files. But yes, it probably could be less than 1GB, so we'll make it slightly smaller for the next release. Older USB1 / USB2 drive also slow down the memory testing as well as the logs take so long to write. So a larger USB3 drive is better in this respect as well.

If you have a modern UEFI system you can actual make your own boot drive on a very small (old & slow) flash drive. Most system will boot off a regular USD drive if you format the drive with FAT32 and place all the boot files in the \EFI\BOOT folder. So if you extract the files from the .IMG image file and drop them into the BOOT folder it should work most of the time.




Some older BIOS don't like this however and in that case the drive needs to be setup as a boot drive via a more complex process.

[Jukka]

Thanks for the reply and workaround, I'll try that later.

I know I have larger USB drives lying around, but I cannot find them, because there is no need for them nowadays. I did find old, smaller drives, 256 and 512 MB and 1 GB, which would have been perfect for the job, but they are currently unsuitable. This is an unfortunate delay to debug the actual issue that I have with my computer.

As a revised suggestion: is it possible to tune to writer software to accommodate small USB drives by their capacity? If all else fails, my last tip is to make the image file fit to a general 1 GB USB drive, where real capacity is somewhere between 850-950 MB. That should be enough for quite long log files.

[David (PassMark)]

The V10.1 release, coming in about 2 weeks, will fit on all 1GB drives.

Years ago the software could all fit on a floppy disk. But the world moves on.

This is an unfortunate delay

Workaround suggested should take no more than a couple of minutes.