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Debian 10.3 text installer; guided partitioning does not work; manual partitioning doesn't make USB bootable

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Hi, I need some ideas for getting Debian 10.3 to install and boot. I
think I'm very close, just missing something.

I'm on an x64 system. What I need to do is to use one live USB to
install to a blank USB, and then have the second USB boot into Debian.

I am blind, which means without speech I don't know what is being
written on the screen.

My OS of comfort is Windows. I downloaded the Debian 10.3 DVD 1 and
used Rufus to burn this image to a USB. This USB boots, and I press S
<Enter> at the boot prompt to start the talking (and text) Debian
installer. So my motherboard [1] and USB ports are perfectly capable
of booting a correctly formatted bootable USB.

I have the second USB inserted into a different USB port. I need this
second USB to have my *.ucode firmware file on it, for my Intel wifi
chip. Therefore this second USB has a FAT32 partition at first.

The installer sees the wi-fi firmware file, gets onto the network, and
now its time to partition. At this point I'm ready to erase the second
USB and make it my permanent live USB. For whatever reason, the
installer complains that the free space is too small [2], and guided
partitioning does not work for me.

Suppose the second USB is /dev/sdc. I manually create a partition
table, a single partition taking up the whole 16 GB flash drive,
filesystem is ext4 and mount to /. (I'm ignoring swap.)

Of note, on this partition I set the "bootable flag" to on.

After software is installed, I get presented with the Grub choice. I
choose to install Grub, to the MBR, but to the second USB /dev/sdc. I
leave my built-in hard drives untouched.

I leave in the second USB, and reboot (both warm reboot and cold
boot.) My computer boots into Windows instead of booting the USB.
Fail.

Of note, if the system recognized the USB as bootable, but Grub boot
loader had an error, I think the system would just sit there at the
Grub/boot loader error and not boot into Windows.

I could use some ideas or a clue for what I'm doing wrong. Thanks in advance!

Alan

[1] Motherboard: Asus Maximus VIII GENE; Chipset: Intel Z170

[2] Failed to partition the selected disk
This probably happened because the selected disk or free space is too
small to be automatically partitioned.

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Debian 10.3 text installer; guided partitioning does not work; manual  partitioning doesn't make USB bootable Alan Tu <8libra@gmail.com> - 2020-03-11 21:00 +0100
  Re: Debian 10.3 text installer; guided partitioning does not work;  manual partitioning doesn't make USB bootable David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2020-03-12 00:30 +0100
  Re: Debian 10.3 text installer; guided partitioning does not work;  manual partitioning doesn't make USB bootable Andrei POPESCU <andreimpopescu@gmail.com> - 2020-03-12 10:00 +0100
    Re: Debian 10.3 text installer; guided partitioning does not work;  manual partitioning doesn't make USB bootable Alan Tu <8libra@gmail.com> - 2020-03-12 13:40 +0100

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