I decided to see if I could get Navigatrix to run on my new Toshiba C850 running Win8.
Changed the BIOS to remove 'secure boot' & turn off the UEFI business & laptop boots up nicely off a CD with Linux Mint on it.
Tried then to boot off the USB but "busybox" reports ...
(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.
Is it a case of the USB actually is "live CD" so it's looking for a CD drive?

[EDIT: burnt the ISO to a DVD & it booted up straight away. Appears to be a USB problem although it did get part way through bootup.]

It seems to be an increasing problem because of the newer machines.

Before the standard was...a slack standard. Show me a boot sector and have at it.

The ISO is a CD/DVD image. Burn it on a piece of mylar or write in the transistors of a memory chip it didn't matter.; data is data.

Then there was the transition to BIOS recognising USB HDD ...usb hard drive device. (As opposed to USB CDROM.) It was still pretty much the same. But it 'knew' the stick wasn't a DVD. To run a LiveCD from a stick some required the BIOS to be set as CD/DVD...other 'knew' that the thing sticking in the side wasn't a CD/DVD player and needed to be set as a USB HDD.

Now with solid state drive machines are becoming more persnickety. Developers are dealing with it by converting ISOs to hybridiISOs that contains code to deal with both increasingly stringent standards.

I'm glad you found a solution even if it is less than optimal.

Same here when booting from an SD card, same error "unable to find a medium containing a file system" and that is it.

Try with a USB Stick instead. SD Card wont get recognized if your SD Card Reader is not connected over internal USB.

But it did recognise the SD card during boot and initial start of Navigatrix, or is that not enough for further starting the system?

I do not have a free USB stick to try, can I use one which already contains some data without loosing that data on the stick?

David is correct. Some machines don't have the plumbing right to boot from a SD card. The error it gives is like the one you reported. And to answer your question, placing the image on a SD card or a USB overwrites everything on the device.

However, there are a two things that might help resolve you situation if your machine has the SD reader on the USB bus.

• checksum validation of the ISO
• method of placing image on the SD

We're looking for integrity of the image; the origin and creation. The uncontrolled variable is the interity of the medium on which it was placed...i.e., it could be a bad cluster on the card. It can happen. Chances are that it's not and the fault come from the first two variables. But it is a possibility.

The easiest is to just re-make the SD. ....if it fails again; check the checksum, which is also easy, but requires a checksum tool.

The method of creation provides an outside chance for a bugger up installation. The problems stemming from some versions of Linux using a squirrely bootloader. Then, as stated, there is a slim chance of a bad spot on the card.

Try re-make the card. Let us know what happens. If there is a failure. Descibe the process by which you created it. By then I'll have some directions for the tools needed to run a checksum, fix the problem or, at least get us further down the path.

Booting from the SD card worked as indicated, but after some initialisation it goes wrong with starting Linux completely. Linux started only partly.
So I used a USB stick with some less important data. I could install without loosing the original data on it. To do that just ucncheck the 'format' option when istalling the ISO file to the USB stick.

I don't know if it's moot at this point, but a corrupted ISO doesn't seem to be the cause of the problem.

There is still the issue of method of creation; the condition of the SD card; and how your SD Card Reader is connected to your system...and at what point 'it gives up'. What do you see?

Now that you have a working copy of Navigatrix open a terminal. You can check the state of your SD withX being the location of your card (a,b,c,d...). Run df -h Match the size with name. In this case it would be /dev/sdb. It must be unmounted.

An easy method to unmount it is to click the rectangle/triangle icon next to the device in the File Manager. You could also run sudo umount /dev/sdX1 from the terminal

Badblocks is a slow process that non-destructively checks for bad sectors. Depending on the horsepower of your machine you could increase the default chunk scan by adding -c 128If it's straining already, reduce -b 1024 or remove it entirely.

More info can be found with
Another method, which will fix 'everything' wrong, but without a progress bar isAgain X is the location of the card.More info can be found with