USB Live Ubuntu Persistence

[Eric Shubert]

Eric Shubert wrote:
> 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. :(
> 

Now that I think of it though, are we confusing partition vs file sizes? 
The 'overlay' partition would be what's over 2G, not a file. From what 
I've seen of overlay filesystems, there are still going to be 
independent files within the partition. It's not just one big file. As 
such, I doubt this is the problem. As always, I could be wrong. I think 
I was on that last post (except for the 2G part!).

-- 
-Eric 'shubes'