Live boot from USB fails

[openmind]

A hearty thanks to everyone who offered assistance on this problem.  At long last, I can report results of a considerable amount of experimentation and troubleshooting that might be useful to the broader Linux Lite community.  I acted on torrydale's suggestion to try installing LL2.6 and then upgrading to LL2.8 and found that both LL2.6 did run the installer from a 2GB USB stick prepared using usb-creator-gtk as recommended by the LL developers on the LL download web page.  It ran, however, with a constant complaint that it could not read HDD sectors 0-7 in cylinder 0.  This led to canceling the install attempt and performing more thorough diagnostics on the HDD (the Dell HD diagnostic diskette ran the seek test for 30 minutes without errors so I aborted it assuming it was fine).  Letting it run to completion and then performing the read and write tests indicated severe HDD failures.  Eventually I ran the Western Digital HDD utility on it and essentially it had to be reinitialized.  After getting the HDD to work, LL2.6 installed successfully but would not complete the update process without failing to update the package index.  Many repeated but failed attempts to get it to succeed led me to download LL2.8 to see if that would install and it did!  However, it would not complete the update procedure either with the same error as the previous release.  Today I rewrote the LL3.0 iso to the 2GB USB stick that would not work before (remember all those dots?) and this time it worked after applying JmaCWQ's suggestion to hit 'tab' and the type "live" at the boot: prompt.  Apparently, the different kernels respond differently when encountering HDD read errors.

A couple of comments about the LL ubiquity installer: The default swap partition with only 512MB RAM is only 512MB in size.  When one has only 512MB RAM (the minimum recommended), the installer should provide at least a GB of swap so the kernel doesn't panic due to memory starvation (the need for swap is not as great if one has a couple of GB of RAM).  Secondly, the partition tool (gparted w/LL2.8) crashed twice trying to shrink a 20GB FAT32 partition to 5 GB (after reducing used  storage to 3 GB and defragging it twice).  It left the FAT32 filesystem in a corrupted state that took a lot of work to recover.  Hope this doesn't happen to anyone else.  I ended up preparing the partitions using PartedMagic running from a CD.

Again, thanks to everyone who contributed.  I have posted my HW configuration in the LiteOS database.  This post was prepared using LL3.0 running on a Dell 4100 having a Pentium III w/512MB RAM and a 12GB ext4 filesystem.  So far it's working fine.