Live Disc with Persistence

[Nio Wiklund]

On 2013-08-12 20:57, John Hupp wrote:
> On 8/11/2013 12:33 PM, John Hupp wrote:
>> I have 4GB and 8GB flash drives currently serving as Live USB drives
>> with persistence running Quantal and Saucy.  For the sake of
>> troubleshooting the Flash/LightDM-login problems more invasively, I
>> would like to make another Live setup with persistence running Raring,
>> but I don't have another bigger flash drive on hand.
>>
>> But I do have several 1GB flash drives.  I tried making a Live USB
>> with one of those, setting persistence storage to 100MB (via
>> UNetBootin).  But when I tried to use it I kept getting
>> no-space-available sorts of errors.  So I concluded that 1GB was too
>> small to serve both for the Live USB and the persistence storage.
>> True?  (Though I think I observed after the fact that UNetBootin had
>> preserved some files and folders that were already on the drive, so
>> maybe I just need to try again after deleting everything or formatting.)
>>
>> I then tried to set up a Raring Live DVD with persistence using either
>> a flash drive or the internal hard drive, but so far have failed.
>>
>> In one case I used Gparted (I don't know where I was using that, since
>> I don't now find it in the installed version of Raring) to create a
>> single ext3 partition labeled casper-rw to serve as the persistence
>> storage, but that didn't work for me.
>>
>> For two other cases I began by running in a terminal:
>>     dd if-/dev/zero of=casper-rw bs=1M count=768
>>     mkfs.ext3 -F casper-rw
>> Then I copied the resulting casper-rw file both to a flash drive and
>> to the hard drive, but booting with the Live disc and either of those
>> running did not result in successful persistence.
>>
>> Can anyone see what I was doing wrong?
>>
> 
> I tried again to make a Live USB with persistence, all on the 1GB stick,
> this time after reformatting (FAT32) and then setting only 50MB for
> persistence in UNetBootin.  And it did have persistence (as in my
> earlier attempt), but 50MB doesn't seem to be enough to do much.  Trying
> to Reload Synaptic, it again yielded the "no space left on the device"
> error.
> 
> I also tried again to get to a workable Live DVD with persistence on a
> USB flash drive.  In Gparted, I deleted the existing partition, created
> a single FAT32-type partition labeled "casper-rw," then formatted the
> partition as FAT32.  I booted to the Live DVD with the flash drive
> inserted (choosing F6 Options and adding " persistent" to the boot
> string), made some changes, rebooted again the same way and found that
> the changes had not been saved.
> 
> So apparently I'm still missing something.
> 
Hi John,

If you manage to get persistence with 50 MB, you are doing it the
correct way. So you should be able to use all remaining space after the
iso is installed (I guess close to 300 MB on a 1 GB pendrive or flash
card). But I think even 300 MB will be full rather soon. If it does not
work when you increase the size of the persistent file, I think
something might be bad with the device or the file system. Or maybe it
is just too slow.

An oversized CD iso or DVD iso will leave less space for persistence,
and I would not bother trying to squeeze persistence into a 1 GB drive.

I bought a cheap ten-pack with 4 GB Sandisk USB 2 pendrives, that I can
use for testing various things. But it is much nicer to have USB 3 for
persistent live and installed systems because it is much faster when
writing huge amounts of small files. (USB 3 pendrives are also faster in
USB 2 ports, because the flash hardware is faster.) Also an old HDD,
that you connect via USB 2, will be faster than a USB 2 pendrive for the
same reason. See this link (Prerequisites: the paragraph about speed).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

4 GB is also enough to install Lubuntu (not a persistent live system,
but installed like it were installed to a HDD). See these links

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstalledSystemFakePAE

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B46yhFQuJvfPRXRvSmJ6b0xoNE0&usp=sharing

This link is faster for downloading the image file

http://phillw.net/isos/lubuntu-fake-pae/raring/installed-system/dd_saucy-a2-installed-system_4GB.img.gz

md5sum:
cd2cc5cfa751a163e19304981f6f44a2  dd_saucy-a2-installed-system_4GB.img.gz

Best regards
Nio