mjhjmtu

How do I install (NOT live-persistence) an xNIX live-iso onto an sd card? I want it to be able to boot on most machines.

In depth:
I've burned a pendrive with parrotsec 4.4 64 bit to install parrot onto the 64GB SD card I have, while having my system drives unplugged (as to not flash EPS onto the existing recovery partition). This failed miserably, even after trying different flashing tools - Etcher which is recommended by Parrot, YUMI, Rufus & UNetbootin - in different modes (auto, DD, ISO) provided by the tools, while also using different partition setups each time (RAW, or pre-formatted FAT32/EXT4) and mixing up MBR/GPT tables with each setup.

Well, it failed booting the sd card pretty much every time with different results: fallback to grub shell, UEFI shell or just a cursor blinking. I think this is ESP/GRUB's fault to some degree, because I'm guessing it wasn't able to find the relevant .efi and I didn't really know how to point it to where it needed (sdx/EFI/boot/.efi?)

Introduction

• Cloning works well in order to create a live Parrot Security 4.4 64-bit drive. I think that it is a good idea to run Parrot live or persistent live from an external drive (USB pendrive, SD card ...). The drive must be big enough (at least 4 GB).




• It is difficult but possible to install Parrot into an SD card (at least 16 GB).




• The graphical installer, that is available via the live system fails for me too as described in the question.




• Things will be cleaner and easier, if you [can] disconnect your internal drives, and use only the drives involved in this task.

How to install to an external drive (in this case an SD card)

• Boot into the live Parrot drive


• In BIOS mode you get a syslinux menu. Select 'Live' at the top of the menu to get a graphical desktop environment


• 
  Insert the SD card (I did it via a USB adapter).


• 
  

  Open a terminal window and run a few commands to prepare the SD card.

  
  
  

  sudo lsblk -fm
  sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=1
  sudo -H gparted /dev/sdX
  

  
  



• The lsblk command will help you identify the target drive, the SD card



• The dd command will wipe the first mibibyte, which makes the installer more willing to install grub. It is very important to write to the SD card, which means that you must select the correct drive letter (for example a or b replacing X) for the SD card. Otherwise you may destroy important data in some other drive. Things are safer, if you have disconnected all other drives (except the live drive and the SD card).


• In gparted you can 'see' the drive information. There should be no partition, not even a partition table.
  
  
  • create a new MSDOS partition table (via 'Device')
  
  


• Shutdown


• Remove the SD card

• Boot from the Parrot live drive again


• In BIOS mode you get a syslinux menu. Select 'Install' near the bottom of the menu. It will bring you to a text mode installer, the old 'debian installer'.


• 
  Insert the SD card (I did it via a USB adapter).


• Select 'Standard Installer' in the next small menu.


• Select language ... (I will not describe all the steps here).


• Select 'Guided - use entire disk'


• Select the device pointing to the SD card ...


• Install the GRUB boot loader, answer 'Yes'


• Select the device pointing to the SD card


• Finish the installation


• Remove the Parrot live drive


• Let the computer reboot

Run the installed Parrot from the SD card

• Reboot and you should be able to boot into your installed Parrot :-)

Fix to improve portability

Let us assume that the computer boots nicely at reboot, with the same drives connected as when you created the Parrot system in the SD card (for example no internal drive connected).

• There may still be problems when you change which drives are connected (for example that you connect an internal drive). The same problems may occur, when you connect the SD card to another computer with one or more internal drives connected.



• 
  

  These problems may be solved by changing the linux line in the menuentries for Parrot in the file grub.cfg, that is used.

  
  
  

  Boot from another drive, for example a live drive.

  
  
  

  sudo lsblk -f # identify the drive and check the UUID
  sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt # mount the drive that contains grub.cfg
  sudo nano /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg # edit grub.cfg
  

  
  
  

  Look for the menuentry paragraphs for Parrot and each line that begins with linux. Replace the root=/dev/sda1 or similar with a device specification to

  
  
  

  root=UUID=042cf088-b051-4961-b206-2c223a31dee2
  

  
  
  

  where the string 042cf088-b051-4961-b206-2c223a31dee2 should be replaced with the actual UUID string (probably present in the menuentry, and identified by the lsblk command line.

  
  

I edited this in my Toshiba laptop with the SD card connected via a USB adapter as /dev/sda and no internal drive connected. I tested it in the same Toshiba with an internal drive and in my Intel NUC with two other drives connected. The following screenshot is from the Intel NUC and shows that the SD card is connected via the built-in slot as /dev/mmcblk0 and there are two other drives connected. Please notice root=UUID=... in grub.cfg

Comments

• In most computers you can boot into SD cards via USB. Some USB adapters work with some computers, but there is no guarantee, several computers and adapters do not cooperate during the boot process.


• In some computers you can boot into SD cards via PCI (typical for built in SD slots in laptops). This is not very common, so you should not expect it to work for you.


• Please notice that the lifetime of an SD card with an installed system can be rather short due to wear because of writing many times to the same memory cells. Cloned live drives are read-only, and not affected at all. Persistent live drives live longer, because there are fewer write operations.

Some commands

Some commands in a terminal window of my installed Parrot test system,

┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Parrot
Description: Parrot 4.4
Release: 4.4
Codename: stable
┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $sudo lsblk -fm

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

 #1) Respect the privacy of others.
 #2) Think before you type.
 #3) With great power comes great responsibility.

[sudo] password for tester: 
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID MOUNTPOINT SIZE OWNER GROUP MODE
sda 29.7G root disk brw-rw----
├─sda1 btrfs 79ad87de-08a8-4623-9afc-7c8b25daa228 / 25.9G root disk brw-rw----
├─sda2 1K root disk brw-rw----
└─sda5 swap dcf02e42-29de-4baa-adc9-febf55e611f8 [SWAP] 3.9G root disk brw-rw----
sr0 1024M root cdrom brw-rw----
┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 384M 6.1M 378M 2% /run
/dev/sda1 26G 12G 14G 47% /
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 384M 24K 384M 1% /run/user/1000
┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $free -m
 total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3831 502 2611 56 718 3048
Swap: 3977 0 3977
┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $uname -a
Linux parrot 4.18.0-parrot10-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.18.10-2parrot10 (2018-11-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux
┌─[tester@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $