Live USB out of space?

[Tehhund]

I'm still cutting my teeth on Ubuntu, so this may be a little remedial. I've been successfully running 9.10 for almost a month off an 8 GB USB drive. Today when I booted, I received a message saying I had 0 bytes of free space remaining. Naturally, any attempt to write to disk has failed - for instance, when I try to install Samba or even create a text file I'm told there's no space.

I found a similar issue here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1124328 , but they are legitimately out of space:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on

...
/dev/sdb1 3948996 3937980 11016 100% /cdrom

However, when I run df:

# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
aufs 2.0G 2.0G 0 100% /
udev 849M 236K 849M 1% /dev
/dev/sda1 7.5G 2.7G 4.9G 36% /cdrom
/dev/loop0 668M 668M 0 100% /rofs
none 849M 1.2M 848M 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 849M 20K 849M 1% /tmp
none 849M 92K 849M 1% /var/run
none 849M 0 849M 0% /var/lock
none 849M 0 849M 0% /lib/init/rw

Look at the /dev/sda1 line - it looks like I have nearly 5 gigs of space available.

I'll admit that I'm still learning how Linux file systems work - I don't think the 'aufs' or '/dev/loop0' entries should be causing this problem, but maybe I'm just missing something. Can someone help me understand why it says I have no free disk space?

[Directive 4]

aufs 2.0G 2.0G 0 100% /

this line don't look so good.

you may find that doing a full install to the usb stick (as opposed to a live usb)

will solve these problems.

guided, use entire disk. is the option to go for.

remember to install the bootloader to the usb stick!

(you can navagate back and forth during the install process, nothing's final untill you click finish (or install? can't remember), the step before this choose advanced options, >bootloader to usb

[Mighty_Joe]

It's possible that your flash memory has "worn out". The typical symptom is that the memory can be read but not written (see here).
If you can't repartition or format the drive, that's probably your issue.
If you do get the drive working and want to try a full install as suggested above, I posted links to a procedure in this topic that includes some settings to improve performance and save wear.

[jimmers]

First of all you could try this tutorial from an earlier thread:-

The following tutorial explains how to create a larger casper-rw loop file for your Ubuntu based flash drive install. For example on: Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Crunchbang or Linux Mint. A larger casper-rw loop file is particularly useful for those who have performed a Linux install to a large thumb drive using a Windows USB tutorial and need more persistent storage space for saving changes. The default casper-rw loop file we used in the Windows USB installation tutorials is only 1GB.
Notes: You will need to perform the following steps from a booted Linux system other than the USB Linux installation. I typically boot from the Live CD and then (once the system is up and running) insert the USB flash drive that contains my Linux install and small casper-rw.
Warning: Block file size must be less than < 4096 MB on a fat32 formatted flash drive due to the 4GB file size limitation of a fat32 partition.
Creating a NEW larger casper-rw loop file

The following method will create a NEW casper-rw file that will replace the old one. If you want to resize an existing image see the next section.

1. After your up and running in Linux, insert the flash drive that contains your casper-rw loop file
2. Open a terminal
3. Type the following into the terminal window and press enter
   
   dd if=/dev/zero of=casper-rw bs=1M count=1024
   (replacing 1024 with the "size in MB" you wish to use for saving changes persistently)
4. Type the following into the terminal and press enter
   
   mkfs.ext3 -F casper-rw
5. Copy the new casper-rw file to your USB flash drive
6. Restart your computer, booting from the USB flash drive and enjoy using the larger casper-rw loop block file you have just created.

Resize an existing casper-rw loop file

The following method will allow you to resize your existing casper-rw image (expand casper-rw). You should create a backup just in case before proceeding.

1. After your up and running in Linux, insert the flash drive that contains your casper-rw loop file
2. Open a terminal and change directory (CD) to the location of your casper-rw file
3. Type the following into the terminal window and press enter
   
   dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1024 >> casper-rw
   (replacing 1024 with the size in MB you wish to increase the original size by)
4. Type the following into the terminal window and press enter
   
   resize2fs casper-rw

If all goes well, you should now have a larger casper-rw loop file to use for saving your persistent changes.
Secondly you could try this tutorial from UbuntuGeek:-
I was reading How to install Ubuntu Linux from USB Stick posted on this site a while ago, and found it to be quite some work to get Ubuntu working on a USB stick. Besides, having to prepare your USB device, creating a separate partition on it which will be more or less “useless” after the installation, giving up 750MB of space?
There had to be a better way.
Together with a colleague of mine, I decided to figure out whether there could be an easier way to install Ubuntu on a USB device.
I found a way of doing it in a much simpler way… without creating the separate partition to store the LiveCD:
A couple of assumptions to take into account when going through this manual:

• My computer (Dell D820 laptop) has 1 internal disk, devided into 3 partitions (dell utility - windows - Ubuntu 8.04)
• Just one USB device (in my case a 250GB harddisk
• BIOS configured to enable boot from internal HDD, CD/DVD and USB Storage device

(I didn’t take screenshots, so I will be explaining a lot about the screens… It looks like a lot of work, but trust me: it is not, and it really is easy

1. Insert the LiveCD into your computer;
2. Connect your USB device;
3. Boot your computer from the liveCD;
4. Once Ubuntu is started, go to System - Administration - Partition Manager
   This will open the Partion Editor. Select your USB device and delete all partitions on it. Click Apply and exit Partition Editor;
5. Double Click the Install Icon. This will start the Installer;
6. The Welcome Screen is shown. Choose your language and click Forward;
7. Select your Time Zone and click Forward;
8. Choose your Keyboard Layout and click Forward;
9. The partitioner will be started, and you will be given the choice where to install Ubuntu. Choose Guided - Use entire disk, selecting your USB device (this will most likely be /dev/sdb, don’t choose /dev/sdb1!);
10. The next sceen you will give your username/password information. Provide the required info and hit Forward;
11. If there is anything to migrate from other installations on your computer (most likely not), do whatever you want, and click Forward;
12. The next screen is important - It is titled: “Ready to Install”. Be careful here: before clicking on Forward, make sure you click on the “Advanced” Button!
    This will open a new screen, giving you the option whether and where to install the bootloader. Select your USB device (in my case it was /dev/sdb) to install the bootloader to;
    Exit this screen and click on Forward in the “Ready to Install” screen, which will be shown;
13. The installation will be started now. Just be patient, grab a cup of coffee and come back 15 minutes later, your installation will be more or less finished by then.

So you have finished the installation. However, when you will be restarting your system from USB, you will find out that the partition you just installed Ubuntu to cannot be mounted.
Here comes the trick:

1. Once the installation is finished, reboot your PC (this is the safest) from your LiveCD, with your USB device connected;
2. Once started, open up a terminal (Applications - Accessories - Terminal);
3. In the Terminal, type: sudo -i (which will give you root privileges, so be careful from now on!);
4. Change directories to /media/disk/boot/grub - This will take you to the “/boot/grub” directory on the USB device;
5. open menu.lst with vi (make a backup first!)
6. Go to line 130 (or somewhere in that area).
   You will find a line looking like:
   ## ## End Default options ##
   And underneath it you will find three entries pointing to your Ubuntu you just installed:
   title Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
   root (hd1,0)
   kernel /boot/vmlinuz………
   initrd /boot/initrd…….
   quiet
   (the above 5 lines repeat 3 times with slight differences)
7. The magic trick is to change (hd1,0) into (hd0,0) for all these three entries.
   Why? Booting from USB device makes your USB device hd0, in stead of hd1 at time of installation.
8. Search for the line starting with “# groot=(hd1,0)” and change (hd1,0) to (hd0,0) - Don’t delete the # at te beginning of this line!
9. Once you did this, you can optionally remove the remaining of the file
   (everything underneath ### END DEBIAN AUTOMATIC KERNELS LIST);
10. Save the file, make sure it is owned by root:ubuntu (chgrp ubuntu menu.* will do)
11. Edit device.map (in the same directory) and change the mapping of hd0 to /dev/sdb.
12. Reboot your machine, from USB, choose the Ubuntu installation from the Boot Loader and you are one happy person.

I guess that is it. If I missed something, please comment.
Regards,


The latter tutorial worked for using a 16 Gb Flash Drive I have all my free space,
and I am using it now as I write


Good Luck
Jim

[dcstar]

All Live USBs with persistence will eventually run out of space.

The nature of the AUFS filesystem used on these means that when a file is deleted or replaced, you never (ever) get to use that space again.

It is done deliberately so that the disk I/O is spread out on the whole the USB device, because repeatedly using the same area on these SSD devices will prematurely kill them.

The only practical "solution" I have found is to back up the data, wipe and recreate the persistent space and then restore the data. If you have a big enough persistence file to start with then you don't need to do this sort of thing too often.

There are HOWTOs on hacking configuration files to make the Live USB not use AUFS, but they look horribly complicated and aren't really worth the effort (IMHO).

[ttguy]

I had this issue too. And if I put 2 and 2 together with the info from dcstar about how persistence always runs out of space I have a few suggestions on this matter.

When you create a Live USB instance with the "Start Up Disk Creator" the default amount of persistence is pitifully small - 128Mb. And if what dcstar says is correct then I guess you can quickly use this up even if you don't think you are saving any thing to your stick - this is what happened to me.

You will also get misled by looking at available space on your USB stick when you mount it like a regular file system (ie when not booting from it). My live USB was created with 128Mb of persistence and so it will report running out of space when booting from it but when looking at it as mounted as a file system it reported 3Gig free.

So best bet I reckon is to create the live USB with a large persistence file. This file consumes your USB memory even when you have not written to it. - Which I think is a good thing because you are not mislead about how much space you have on the stick.