USB Live Ubuntu Persistence

[Eric Shubert]

Dazed_75 wrote:
> Saturday I was helping Matthew create a Live Ubuntu USB stick.  We 
> succeeded but for some reason persistence was not working and I could 
> not figure out why.  I did the same thing here at home and persistence 
> works fine.  In fact, I think I know the answer now.  Mathew was using a 
> 16 GB flash drive and wanted the rest of the drive used for persistent 
> storage. 
> 
> The problem was, I believe, that the flash drive was formatted for FAT32 
> which has a file size limit of 4GB.  It appears the utility to create 
> the LiveUSB ubuntu stick creates a special file to use for the "overlay" 
> (my term) file system that is merged onto the read only filesystem from 
> the Live image.  Since we were asking it to make a 14.4GB overlay file 
> on a FAT32 partition, that part of the install failed silently and 
> persistence was was working.
> 
> Mathew, I believe there are several ways to resolve this with the 
> simplest being to only ask for 4GB of persistent storage.  The rest of 
> the stick should still be usable though you may find it handy to make 
> the rest a separate partition and mount it within the LiveUSB Ubuntu.  
> You should even be able to make the mount persistent.
> 
> -- 
> Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry
> 

That sounds like a possibility all right. TTBOMK though, FAT32 has a 2G 
file size limit. :(

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'