Live persistence

[bugfree]

I have LL on a 8GB stick using Unetbootin. It has many programs installed. Have done the usual trick of deleting the casper-rw file, resizing and making an ext2 partition labeled casper-rw for persistence. According to gparted the size of the stick is 7.45GiB with 5.28Gib used and 2.17Gib unused.

Used DD to copy to a 16Gb stick which successfully cloned the 8Gb stick breaking it into a 8Gb partition and an 8Gb unallocated partition. I want to increase the persistence to use all the 16Gb stick, i.e. the unallocated partition, but retaining the installed progs.

Initially, I deleted the casper-rw file and reduced the OS to a minimum. This of course removed all the installed programs leaving just the OS.

Could anyone offer any suggestions as to how I might go about achieving this. Tks!

[LL-user]

Hi,

Have you tried to extent the ext2 partition in gparted after cloning your 8GB stick to the 16GB stick?

Btw. you can also copy partitions with gparted.

I usually approach tasks like these with a PartedMagic Live CD as all tools are there (But of course it can be done also in LL.):

* Clonzilla for cloning of partitions or the whole device to another device
* Gparted to resize the partition(s).

To be more precise with help/ advise it would be helpful if you posted the output relevant to your USB stick(s) of
$ sudo fdisk -l

[bugfree]

Source and target sticks are identical, except for size. Tried expanding partition to max and copying some large files. Unsuccessful as no space left.

Resized partition to minimum and created a new ext2 partition in remainder. Recopied large files which again failed due to no space left.

Have a casper folder, a casper-rw file of 4GB, a casper-rw partition with a lost+found folder inside.

Sysconfig has boot=casper persistent.

As all my externally installed programs all seem to be in the casper-rw file of 4Gb leaving 2Gb unused, is it possible to copy the casper-rw file to the to the partition and point sysconfig to the partition by changing boot=casper.  :-\

[LL-user]

Hm, so do I get this correct:

1. The resizing processes finish successfully without any error message?

2. Are you able to create/ delete files (for example via touch) in the partition BEFORE you resize them?

3. Are you able to create/ delete files (for example via touch) in the partition AFTER you resize them opposed to copying files over?

4. "fdiskl -l" shows exactly the same output for both sticks? (Still would be helpful to see the output/ get more info of the layout and error messages)

5. Have you tried to create the partitions on the 16GB stick manually and copy over the fat32 partition via gparted and the ext2 content via rsync?

[bugfree]

1. The resizing processes finish successfully without any error message?

Yes! Never any errors. The dd command creates an exact copy of my original 8Gb stick onto the 16Gb stick, in which I have 1 fat32 partition. The dd command divides the target 16Gb stick equally, with the first half containing an exact copy of the source, with the other half unallocated.

2 and 3. Yes!

4.

Code:

linuxlite@linuxlite-Aspire-E1-571:~$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdd
[sudo] password for linuxlite:

Disk /dev/sdd: 15.6 GB, 15631122432 bytes
35 heads, 21 sectors/track, 41536 cylinders, total 30529536 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1   *          32    15633407     7816688    b  W95 FAT32
linuxlite@linuxlite-Aspire-E1-571:~$

5. No. The problem is not so much creating or copying partitions. It's more to do with the limitation of the 4Gb file size for persistence.

Just looking at this again, I think I have confused myself with the way the original stick was created. The stick only has 1 partition. So I must have used unetbootin to create the live usb and selected the persistence file to be the maximum of 4Gb. After that, I installed approx 2Gb of programs which now leaves 2Gb of persistence space remaining. Total 8Gb.

DD'd to a 16Gb stick which equally divides the stick into 2 as stated above. Now I'm trying to utilize the unallocated 8Gb partition. I can't now delete the casper-rw file as this kills all my installed programs. So I'm trying to be able to install more programs or files that will fill up the 2Gb left of the original persistence file with any flow over contained in the unallocated 8Gb half of the stick. Obviously after formatting!

Not sure if this is even possible. I can of course go back and start over using a 16Gb stick in the first place as per the paragraph above, but then I need to reinstall and set up all my programs again and it is this aspect I'm attempting to avoid.

Any further thoughts and thanks for your help so far.

[LL-user]

Ah, now it's getting clearer Even if this doesn't solve your problem (yet)

So you have run into the 4GB file size limitation on FAT32 and you actually don't have a dedicated ext2 partition representing the casper-rw file.

If I'm not mistaken, the question remains how you will be able to get the data from within the casper-rw file transferred over to an ext2 partition on your 16GB stick.
Anything else should be clear now, shouldn't it? Also considering the awesome manual from gold_finger:
https://www.freecinema2022.gq/forums/insta.../#msg12855

And here seems to be the answer for the remaining question:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/435320/h...-partition

Hope that helps

[bugfree]

Thanks for the help!
I used dd to copy my casper-rw file to my second partition thus:-

sudo dd if=/media/OC3C-737A/casper-rw of=/dev/sdc2 and then
deleted my casper-rw persistence file.

Booted OK, but now back to a virgin state. Labeled the 2nd partition casper-rw and tried again.

This time booted with all my installed programs. But cannot delete the casper-rw sitting in trash, nor can I resize the 2nd partition. Gparted shows it as 1.87 used and 2.13 unused which obviously is the 4Gb persistence. The used section displays as yellow, beside that is a white section (most likely denoting the unused part) and beyond is a gray section, which is most likely the remainder of the stick. And as I can't delete the casper-rw sitting in trash, the 1st part of the stick still shows it as used.

I'm terribly confused now, so I think I'll regard it as beyond my skill level and go back to the way I know i.e. start with a larger virgin stick, resize, create a 2nd ext2 partition, then reinstall all my programs.

I have made many successful sticks this way but recently gparted started to ruin my sticks when resizing the fat32 partition. Gparted on an old machine makes the sticks perfectly, but using it with the latest OS's seems to destroy them. I suspect something awry with gparted, but who knows.

However with each failure, I learn a little bit more from the kind assistance of forum members. Thanks again!

[LL-user]

You're welcome

So, have you closed the chapter or are you willing to dig deeper/ waiting for more input?

[bugfree]

Hi LL-user,
Obviously, it would be good to find a solution, but I need to step back before attacking it again. I want to ensure that the sticks I am using are OK to start with and also to recap on what's been tried. So for the time being, I'll have a break and move on to playing with the latest LL. That will keep me occupied for a while.
Thanks for your help to date! 
Kind regards,

[LL-user]

Thanks for letting me/us know. Am sure we'll hear back whenever you decide to carry on with this little project
In the meantime enjoy LL2.4
All the best