I'm feeling pretty moronic, I have to be missing something here. I downloaded elementary and built a bootable USB stick using Rufus. I want to have a standalone, separate from the HDD, copy of elementary that is optimized, updated and with apps. I have a second USB stick that I wish to use for this purpose.
So. Elemental starts and runs on the first stick. It asks if I want to install it. I say yes. I then pick "something else" and point it to the second stick. It goes out and returns an error dialog that says, "No root system is defined, please correct this with the partitioning menu."
Huh. At this point, it would be dang nice if it said, "Would you like me to fix this for you?" But all right. I close that out and first try the "new partition table" option. It blows the partition on the stick, and then nothing else happens, other than I now have an empty stick. I revert. So I look for the "partitioning menu." And of course, there isn't one that I can find. Error messages should match the environment. But I do find GParted, and ah-hah, the stick is formatted as fat32. So, I tell GParted to blow the partition and make the drive EXT2. It does.
I start the install dialog, elementary sees the stick as EXT2, I tell it to put the OS there and to put the bootloader there, and it comes back with the same problem. No root filesystem.
I then change the stick to EXT4 just to see, and that fails too.
So I simply don't know what to do next. Help!
-Joe