USB Complete Copy Error

[banderson]

Hello all,
I'm very new to Kali Linux, maybe been using it for two months now. I created my first copy on a 32gb Samsung USB and it's run awesome. After that, I wanted to expand my memory, so I purchased a 128gb flash drive from some China maker. I have not been able to install Kali on that drive, and I must have tried a dozen times to do so. My latest attempt involved using dd to make a 100% exact copy of the working drive onto the new drive, infallible, right? No such luck, every time I install Kali, including this time, I've gotten the same error. The first load after the install I get a message that says 'no boot options available' restarting after that shows the Kali boot option screen, but choosing any of the options has the same result: It looks like it starts to load, and then briefly flashes invalid argument in the output area. For the life of me, I can't figure out what's going on. I've read that it has something to do with grub, so here's my fdisk output, hope it helps (The drive in question is sdc, sdb is my working copy):

Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 85B776A8-F65D-43AD-B021-9253E2AD342D

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1026047 1024000 500M EFI System
/dev/sda2 975532032 976506879 974848 476M Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda3 976506880 976769023 262144 128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda4 1026048 975532031 974505984 464.7G Microsoft basic data

Partition table entries are not in disk order.




Disk /dev/sdb: 29.9 GiB, 32086425600 bytes, 62668800 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa9ef3e16

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 * 64 5734399 5734336 2.8G 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdb2 5734400 5735807 1408 704K 1 FAT12
/dev/sdb3 5736448 62668799 56932352 27.2G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/loop0: 2.5 GiB, 2679435264 bytes, 5233272 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/sdc: 125 GiB, 134217728000 bytes, 262144000 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xa9ef3e16

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 64 5734399 5734336 2.8G 17 Hidden HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sdc2 5734400 5735807 1408 704K 1 FAT12
/dev/sdc3 5736448 62668799 56932352 27.2G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/mapper/sdb3: 27.1 GiB, 29147267072 bytes, 56928256 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

[Mister_X]

Just erase all of those partition and recreate a FAT32 partition then format it. Then you also want to test if the capacity advertised is real with something like this https://fixfakeflash.wordpress.com/faq-read/

[banderson]

Could an incorrect size reading really prevent the whole drive from booting? I know it has at least 32gb of storage because it was able to copy without an error.

[banderson]

Upon reading more, it looks like the boot error could be coming from errors with the GRUB launcher, one forum suggests that I add a grub.cfg for the launching process, the only problem is that people say to add it under efi/boot, and that appears to be a read only folder, any idea on how to change this?

[banderson]

I guess my question was, which partition should I create my grub config in?