Better way to create bootable USB drive?

[chombee]

I found a work-around for this. Created two FAT32 partitions on my USB 
thumb drive using gparted, a 3GB one labelled Ubuntu which I installed 
Ubuntu 8.04.3 onto using USB Startup Disk Creator in Karmic and a second 
partition, filling the rest of the available space on my thumb drive, 
labelled Files. On booting from the Ubuntu partition the Files partition 
is automatically mounted and appears on the desktop. I'll store most of 
my files on there, probably replace most of the top-level diectories in 
my homedir with symlinks into the Files partition so I don't forget to 
use it. When you insert the thumb drive into an already booted machine 
you can mount the Files partition and read and write it like a normal 
partition, the Ubuntu partition mounts too but it just contains the 
files of the live system, nothing useful to read or write.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 11:47:37PM +0000, chombee wrote:
> When you create a bootable USB drive with persistence using Ubuntu's USB 
> Startup Drive Creator (I've been using the version in Karmic) you have 
> to specify how much of the USB drive should be reserved for the 
> persistence space. This reserved space is not available when you just 
> use the USB drive as a normal USB drive without booting from it, when 
> using the USB drive normally you can't access the files from your Ubuntu 
> homedir, when booting from the USB drive you can't seem to access any 
> files that were put on the drive when not booting from it.
> 
> Is there a better way to create a bootable USB drive? Ideally it would 
> just fill the entire drive with a partition, install Ubuntu onto that 
> partition, and have the whole remaining space of the partition available 
> to save files when booting from the drive. When using the drive without 
> booting from it the same partition, including the Ubuntu files, homedir, 
> and desktop, would be available for reading and writing. This would be 
> significantly more useful.
> 
> 
> -- 
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users