Live USB sticks with persistence

[gold_finger]

Hi All,
Just playing around with this project again, but have hit a snag. Latest Gparted seems to have a bug.

When resizing a fat32 partition, the setup is accepted, but on pressing Enter, the program exits. No changes are made to the stick. Repeating the operation on an older version of Gparted will resize the partition perfectly. Only happening on latest linux distros with gparted included.

Anyone else encountered this.

@bugfree,

Yes, I've encountered same problem trying to resize USB partitions with GParted.  Not sure what's causing that and haven't had time to look into it more myself yet.


Regarding problems creating live USB's with persistence, I haven't run into problems with that -- but I haven't tried doing it the way you are attempting in quite a while.  You're trying to get around the 4GB persistence size limit by using a separate (bigger) Ext2 partition.  I've done that too, but not recently.  Since you're having problems resizing USB partitions, here is what I would suggest going strickly from memory of the last time I did this.  (I used UNetbootin at the time instead of DD, so that's what I'll post here.)

• On your USB stick, make one FAT32 partition slightly bigger than the ISO file you're using -- approx 100-200MB's bigger.
  
• Also make a second partition on it that covers the rest of the space, formatted as Ext2, but don't label it yet.
  
• Direct UNetBootin to make the live USB on the first (FAT32) partition and have it set to use persistence.  (The persistence file that gets created will only be 100-200MB's in size -- the difference between the size of ISO file and total size of FAT32 partition.)
  
• Close UNetbootin when it completes and "safely" remove the USB stick.  (Make sure you select to "unmount" or "eject" it; don't just pull the stick if it's mounted.)
  
• Wait 15-30 seconds, then plug the USB back into computer.
  
• Use file manager to find the "casper-rw" file on it and delete it.  (Note:  you're not booted into the USB stick for this -- you're still in your regular LL system, or whatever distro you're using on the computer.)
  
• Close file manager, then open GParted and display the USB stick.
  
• Right-click the big Ext2 partition and choose "Label".  (If that partition is mounted, you'll need to unmount it first -- right-click it, choose "Unmount", then proceed with labeling it.)
  
• Label that partition as "casper-rw" (lowercase letters, no quote marks).
  
• Close GParted.
  
• Now, when you start from the USB stick it should have persistence enabled but using the big Ext2 partition for it instead of the small casper-rw file that it had set initially.
  

Hopefully my memory is correct on steps above.  Advantage of that is you don't have to go back and resize anything -- partitions are sized ahead of time.

Unfortunately I can't find the resource at the moment but I remember having read something about the different architecture of USB sticks that supposedly makes a huge difference for usages like ours.

@LL-user,

If you happen to stumble back on to that info, I'd be interested in seeing it.