Gijsbert_Wiesenekk
December 15th, 2015, 07:28 PM
Hi,
I wanted to create a bootable Ubuntu 14.04 USB key with more than 4GB persistent storage. This turned out to be not easy at all: I have tried all possible combinations of MBR/GPT formatted USB keys with all possible combinations of Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator/Universal-USB-Installer/Unetbootin but either the resulting USB key would not boot (the infamous initramfs error) or the persistent storage was still limited to 4GB or the persistent storage would not work (either the casper-rw file or the casper-rw/live-rw labeled partition).
What worked like a charm however was the suggestion I found on the Internet to create as root a Virtualbox VM that boots from the Live ISO image with the USB key attached as a physical disk, so:
$ sudo virtualbox
Create a new virtual machine with 2GB of RAM without a harddisk. Create a vmdk that maps to the USB key:
$ sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename <path-to-VM-directory>/<name-of-vmdk>.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/<device-name-of-USB-key>
Attach the vmdk to the SATA controller of the VM, boot the VM and install Ubuntu on the harddisk.
Regards,
Gijsbert
I wanted to create a bootable Ubuntu 14.04 USB key with more than 4GB persistent storage. This turned out to be not easy at all: I have tried all possible combinations of MBR/GPT formatted USB keys with all possible combinations of Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator/Universal-USB-Installer/Unetbootin but either the resulting USB key would not boot (the infamous initramfs error) or the persistent storage was still limited to 4GB or the persistent storage would not work (either the casper-rw file or the casper-rw/live-rw labeled partition).
What worked like a charm however was the suggestion I found on the Internet to create as root a Virtualbox VM that boots from the Live ISO image with the USB key attached as a physical disk, so:
$ sudo virtualbox
Create a new virtual machine with 2GB of RAM without a harddisk. Create a vmdk that maps to the USB key:
$ sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename <path-to-VM-directory>/<name-of-vmdk>.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/<device-name-of-USB-key>
Attach the vmdk to the SATA controller of the VM, boot the VM and install Ubuntu on the harddisk.
Regards,
Gijsbert