8.10 with persistence to large USB stick

[ArgentSilver]

So I have this 16GB stick that I want to use as a bootable live 8.10. It turns out to be very difficult to use the full 16GB of space. The "Create a USB startup disk" tool will only use the stick formatted as FAT32, which means that the maximum file size for a persistence casper-rw is 4GB, and the rest of the stick is wasted space.

Does anyone know how to either make a bootable stick formatted with ext2 OR to make a 1GB FAT32 partition for the boot and use a second ext2 partition for the casper-rw?

[fatbotgw]

Have you tried using GParted to resize the fat32 partition and create a new ext2 partition in the free space?

[ArgentSilver]

I can make the partitions just fine with Gparted. That's not the issue. What I was asking was how to get the live Ubuntu to use the second ext2 partition for its persistence casper-rw file? OR if that's not possible, then is it possible to make a bootable stick completely partitioned as ext2?

[grndslm]

I'm confused about this second, ext2, casper-rw partition, too. I have a 32 GB flash drive I'm trying to install ubuntu on and casper-rw never seems to be written to, but I still haven't really gotten the "live", persistent mode yet (keeps giving errors about mode=755). I'm on Hardy and cannot upgrade to Intrepid, so don't suggest that.

Plus, I can't do FAT 16 or ext2 like most of the guides suggest (always errors about incorrect sectors or clusters or something). Is there any benefit to using either one of those on a flash drive versus FAT32 or ext3?

[ArgentSilver]

OK, so my whole approach was based on Intrepid's option to Create a USB startup disk (which you say you can't upgrade to) so I may not be too much help. But the way I understand it, the casper-rw file is the compressed file where the 'persistent' info is saved between uses. The problem with the Intrepid tool is that it ONLY uses FAT32, so maximum file size is 4GB. If you could use ext2, this limit disappears. I read that you shouldn't use a journaling file system (like ext3) on a USB stick.

Another good tool for making an Ubuntu boot stick is Unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/). You might try that, but I don't think it supports 'persistence' if you care about that...

[nosatalian]

Can anyone who has done this please post the resulting USB image so we can use dd to put it on a drive.

I'm trying to get rid of Windows on my new X200 thinkpad, but I don't have CDROM to boot, and I don't have access to an existing linux machine to run all these USB image creator tools. What I really need is the finished product, so I can just dd it and boot.

If someone has one but no space to upload, I will see if I can setup an FTP for you to use.

[ArgentSilver]

Can anyone who has done this please post the resulting USB image so we can use dd to put it on a drive.

I'm trying to get rid of Windows on my new X200 thinkpad, but I don't have CDROM to boot, and I don't have access to an existing linux machine to run all these USB image creator tools. What I really need is the finished product, so I can just dd it and boot.

If someone has one but no space to upload, I will see if I can setup an FTP for you to use.

FYI, Unetbootin will run under Windows and will use a downloaded .iso file for Ubuntu that you would normally burn to CD. So you run Unetbootin under Windows and it will create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick for you!