Official MediCat USB - A Multiboot Linux USB for PC Repair

[ankitbnl406]

HI dear,

it was installing and some error came but now i cant see my usb. How can i see it again

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

HI dear,

it was installing and some error came but now i cant see my usb. How can i see it again

There are two/three things that possibly happened:

1. the partition and/or table got corrupted and may need to be recreated.

2. writing 20+GB of MediCat's data to your USB drive (or adapter) happened to double as a "stress test" and reveal that your USB drive is actually flaky and has possibly suffered a hardware failure.

3. your USB drive is actually a fake/bootleg that advertises more disk capacity than it actually has by a large degree (e.g. advertises 32GB but is actually only 2GB)

Regardless, I recommend using gparted from a live Linux distribution booted either from a DVD or from a different USB drive (for Windows users lacking experience with Linux, I would normally recommend Linux Mint but, until Mint 22.2 releases this summer that incorperates an important NTFS bugfix, I must instead recommend Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.10 at this time). If you're familiar with a Steam Deck's desktop mode, then Kubuntu 24.10 may be a good option as well.

Once booted to the desktop your live Linux distribution, you should be able to open it's equivalent of the Windows Start Menu and just start typing gparted and click on the listing that appears. In the new window that shows up, click the drop-down menu in the top-right corner and see if your USB drive is listed. If it is, select it and then click the Device and Create partition table... and make sure it's using an msdos type and click apply.

 

[MON5TERMATT]

I cannot for the life of me find out why Medicat continues to randomly make USB drives unreadable. I get this complaint at LEAST once a month from someone. I don't know if its ventoy or 7zip that is killing the drives, but the installer is actually really simple. It's not doing anything special that would kill a drive.

PS. if you randomly jump in my DM's yelling that our "app" killed your $100 drive, it's a good way to get blocked and or banned from the discord.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

EDIT: Idea! H2testw is already included in the "Programs" folder in MediCat, so for a "full-fat installation process", why not have the user run that on their destination drive before actually installing MediCat onto their drive? The idea is that the users having MediCat seemingly "kill their drives" are semi-likely to be the type to either blindly follow instructions and H2testw will catch the issue first, or they're the type that don't fully read and follow instructions at which point you can say "did you follow the instructions where it says to run H2testw first?" or the like.

Basically I'm seeing this as kind of the equivalent of a non-quick disk format in Windows, but of course chkdsk doesn't actually check for hardware stability or the like, hence my suggestion of H2testw.

—————————————————

Honestly my best guess is that so many modern flash drives are cheap crap using bottom-of-the-barrel flash memory and flash controllers and is partly why I haven't actually spent money on a flash drive in years. For any larger capacities I just use 2.5" SATA SSDs (optionally combined with a USB adapter or just connected straight via SATA or eSATA) and it's been extremely flawless (except for the "quirk" that Crucial SSDs are too paranoid when the power or data connection becomes unstable and permanently locks their firmware into a read-only state). Of course the irony is that even 2.5" SSDs nowadays are starting to become "cheap no-name crap" with all the money going to NVMe stuff instead...

Also so many people don't go trying to write 20+ worth of GB at a time across a larger quantity of files rather than just a couple really large files (multiple smaller files should be more demanding on a file system), so this is probably the first time they've ever done that onto their flash drive and, surprise! their drive isn't actually up to snuff.

(fun fact: I had a very early generation 32GB SATA SSD, the OCZ Onyx, that freaked out and "temporarily died" after trying to write too much data too quickly via newer faster hardware that wouldn't be CPU-bottlenecked, so nowadays when I write 10s of gigabytes at a time to that specific drive I'll intentionally either massively underclock the CPU to sub-1GHz or connect the drive via a USB 1.1 hub, though I'd think USB 2.0 would probably be slow enough as well but I'm not taking any chances since this is one of the only SSDs capable of manually activating its TRIM-like function under Windows XP via "wiper.exe" that I have run at every startup)


It's similarly worth noting that 2 flash drives I have (one originally was my sister's and the other was a freebie from my father's workplace) from the mid 2010s actually suffered bit rot after just a few years (again, likely using el-cheapo QLC NAND and such). But my old flash drives with capacities measured in megabytes? Freakin flawless.

(keep in mind that older flash memory from the early 2010s and even earlier is also more robust not just in terms of yields but also due to the combination of typically being MLC or even SLC as well as using larger transistor sizes - this is why, for example, any flash memory devices like late-life N64 cartridge saves, GBA cart saves, GameCube memory carts, or early revision Wii consoles, will likely not suffer any bit rot for multiple decades)

 

[nekinhas]

@Jayro Hi thanks for amazing Medicat. Maybe someone already asked this but i didn't find looking in the forum.
I want to update the iso on medicat but want to convert and compress them into .wim files to reduce the size, can you please tell how u do it and what apps you use?
And is it only necessary to copy them to the folders with the same names as the older iso or is it necessary to change any configuration file?

Thanks
Keep up with the good work.

 

[Jayro]

@Jayro Hi thanks for amazing Medicat. Maybe someone already asked this but i didn't find looking in the forum.
I want to update the iso on medicat but want to convert and compress them into .wim files to reduce the size, can you please tell how u do it and what apps you use?
And is it only necessary to copy them to the folders with the same names as the older iso or is it necessary to change any configuration file?

Thanks
Keep up with the good work.

All of the windows-based bootable are already boot.wim files, you just need to drag, drop, and rename to update them. Any remaining ISO images are linux-based.

 

[nekinhas]

Hi everybody!

Can someone help me fix two icon image i have that appear black on medicat, i don't know how to fix it on photoshop!
Thanks in advance.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

It's because they are WebP images that have been simply been renamed with a .PNG file extension.

 

[nekinhas]

It's because they are WebP images that have been simply been renamed with a .PNG file extension.

Converted to png online, and it works now.
Thanks for the help.

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

Converted to png online, and it works now.

You could have just properly renamed the IrfanView program already included in MediCat which can read webp images without issue.

(in usb://Programs find the program IrfanView and make sure to rename the folder to IrfanView_x64 and, directly inside the folder, make sure the EXE is named i_view64.exe and then it should work in MediCat again)


EDIT:
Wait, I just realized WebP might be handled by a separate plugin that you'd have to manually add, and I've no idea if IrfanView is smart enough to automatically populate plugins or if some setting needs to be applied because, if it's the latter, then it probably wouldn't persist between reboots since it's not the portable version of IrfanView:

• https://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

I suppose you can give it a try anyway?

 

[nekinhas]

You could have just properly renamed the IrfanView program already included in MediCat which can read webp images without issue.

(in usb://Programs find the program IrfanView and make sure to rename the folder to IrfanView_x64 and, directly inside the folder, make sure the EXE is named i_view64.exe and then it should work in MediCat again)

Thanks!! Gonna look into it!

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

Thanks!! Gonna look into it!

Wait, I just realized WebP might be handled by a separate plugin that you'd have to manually add, and I've no idea if IrfanView is smart enough to automatically populate plugins or if some setting needs to be applied because, if it's the latter, then it probably wouldn't persist between reboots since it's not the portable version of IrfanView:

• https://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

I suppose you can give it a try anyway?

 

[MON5TERMATT]

Wait, I just realized WebP might be handled by a separate plugin that you'd have to manually add, and I've no idea if IrfanView is smart enough to automatically populate plugins or if some setting needs to be applied because, if it's the latter, then it probably wouldn't persist between reboots since it's not the portable version of IrfanView:

• https://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm

I suppose you can give it a try anyway?

WebP is the single most annoying extension I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with

 

[Jayro]

WebP is the single most annoying extension I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with

I just wish Windows would support it.

 

[MON5TERMATT]

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To The Moon!
Because cats always land on their feet!


THIS IS A APRIL FOOLS' JOKE, PLEASE DON'T TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, I CANT BELIEVE I HAVE TO SAY THIS!!!

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

I mean, this only makes sense considering Jayro's interest in AI - I mean, what else are you gonna use those multi-thousand dollar scalped GPUs for? Gaming? ＊pffft＊


non-joke DISCLAIMER: I like using integrated graphics to minimize heat output and noise; also I'm stuck with smaller resolutions anyway because I'm quite susceptible to motion sickness and have to stick with smaller screen sizes - portrait could in theory work, but that'd still limit your horizontal resolution to "only" 2880 at absolute maximum (and 2160 or 1440 would be way more common).

 

[Jakmolts]

Good to know. It worked for me in legacy mode too, but I only have 3 co.puters in my house to test it out on, and none of them have just a legacy BIOS.

How do you do it . I mean steps to make it works fir both BIOS(LEGACY) and UEFI using GPT

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

How do you do it . I mean steps to make it works fir both BIOS(LEGACY) and UEFI using GPT

If you do it the manual way (install Ventoy first), then it's very easy to configure Ventoy as such. Then you can just manually copy over the corresponding MediCat files.

 

[Jakmolts]

______________________________
Medicat VHD in Medicat 21.03 works well in LEGACY MODE.

I don't havr VHD in my file

 

[Nintendo Maniac]

I don't have VHD in my file

Maybe because the post you're quoting is talking about an older version (21.03?)? The latest version is 21.12 which, as you state, does not seem to have a VHD file - my guess is that it's been superseded by a different method of doing things.

Again, if you want to be able to boot in legacy mode, just install Ventoy the normal way (it defaults to legacy + UEFI, though Medicat requires that you format as NTFS instead of exFAT, but you can also do this after-the-fact by simply manually reformatting the "Ventoy" partition) and then extract the Medicat files to the aforementioned NTFS-formatted "Ventoy" partition.