Mh, I think the first thing, what you need to do, before heading to a total manual install, is to ensure, that your USB sticks always have the correct device node and they are not mixing up between two reboots.
So you did not run the ext init step and only modified the config file? Can you describe at which point you got the I/O errors?
regards
Matthias
So you did not run the ext init step and only modified the config file? Can you describe at which point you got the I/O errors?
regards
Matthias