How do I create the persistent file on a live USB pendrive?

[phayz]

I have created a Salix 13.37 MATE Edition live USB pendrive and it's working well. Now what want to do is create the persistent file on the USB pendrive so that there is little or no impact upon on the host system on which I boot it. Essentially I want the installation being completely portable.

I have run the Persistence Wizard but it only shows partitions on the host system's hard drive.

[mimosa]

How did you create the Live USB?

[phayz]

Embarrassing. I search for "usb persistent" and find that one of the first matches is my own thread. I'll mark this closed since I'm trying this again.

[phayz]

Take 2 - In fact I want to resurrect this topic.

I create a Salix OS 13.37 MATE edition live USB key by dd-ing the live ISO to a 4 GB USB key. It boots perfectly but I would like to make the installation persistent. The Persistence Wizard requires a partition on the host for storage of the persistence file. Instead of that method I want the persistence file on the USB key itself.

I have also tried creating a bootable USB key with persistence already enabled using the LiveClone tool, choosing USB, "clone of ISO" (or whatever the wording is), and running it through to completion. I have tried this on 2 different USB keys and neither of them boot. Instead I get a blank screen with an underscore cursor blinking in the top left-hand corner.

[mimosa]

You can't create a persistent file if you start like that, because there is nowhere for it to go. You need to unpack the .iso onto a formatted partition on the USB key and run /boot/install-on-usb.sh

Regarding LiveClone, I've had trouble too, and I think it may sometimes be unreliable.

[phayz]

mimosa,

Thanks for your reply.

I have tried again to create a bootable USB key and this time varied my method, since my current method didn't seem to be working.

To create a bootable Salix OS USB key I tried following this procedure:
1. Run GParted;
2. Delete the existing (1) partition from the USB key;
3. Create 2 new partitions: 1 = 3 GB and 2 = the rest;
4. Format both partitions FAT16;
5. Open the Salix OS 13.37 Xfce live edition ISO and copy the contents of it to the 3 GB partition;
6. In a terminal emulator, navigate to the 'boot' directory on the 3 GB partition;
7. With the 'boot' directory as the current directory and su-d to 'root' user, entered the command "bash ./install-on-USB.sh"

This seemed to go well but when I attempt to boot to the USB key I get the GRUB boot menu and select the default option. The boot process continues but soon stops with a kernel panic with the message just before it saying:

"/sbin/init: exec: line 245: chroot: not found"

[mimosa]

Try with a single fat32 partition occupying the whole stick.

[Adys]

@phayz,

I am a little bit confused by your description.

First, when you "dd" the ISO to your UFD, you can have a persistence in the UFD, but not in the same partition. The partition created by dd is read-only (as the optical media where you would burn the ISO image). So adding a second writable partition is one possibility.

The behavior you described as "Instead I get a blank screen with an underscore cursor blinking in the top left-hand corner" may suggest 2 different possible situations. Either the MBR has no useful code (after several times you wrote over it, it is possible you haven't even noticed the booting code in the MBR is now screwed); or the booting code is working but it "seems" it is not. You can sometimes see a similar behavior when booting an ISO image in VM, and after several seconds (or even a whole minute), the booting process continues.

Of course all this is relevant if your hardware is supported. For example Salix 14.0 XFCE - 32 bits will not boot a non-PAE CPU.

About using GParted, from your description you have no new MBR booting code. Using GParted, you may (or may not) have a clean partition table, but the booting code has most probably not been touched by your described steps. So, if the booting code got screwed, those steps may not solve the booting problem. The fact that you see some GRUB menu doesn't discard the possibility of some residual "mess" from all those previous operations.

BTW, FAT16 for partitions bigger than 2 GB is not a good choice.

Maybe you should first clean up your UFD (or at least the first 4MB) and start over, using one well-known method?

Additionally, how exactly did you get to boot your UFD before all these trials?

[phayz]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. I am working through them and checking my results.

[linus72]

Why not create the persistence file manually?

mount the usb where you want to put the persistence file, cd into the mounted usb, and then run this command as root

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/zero of=slxsave.xfs bs=1M count=1024
mkfs.xfs -f slxsave.xfs

That would create a 1GB save file
NOTE: That's if Salix is still using the slxsave.xfs type file....