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View Full Version : [ubuntu] boot error when persistent from USB



justin_guerin
May 16th, 2008, 04:38 AM
Hi,

I have 8.04 installed on my USB stick. When I boot just the live system, it works great. When I boot the persistent option, I get dumped into ash, where I found this log entry:

mount: Mounting /dev/sdb2 on /cow failed: Invalid argument
Can not mount /dev/sdb2 on /cow

I tracked this down to the file /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper, from the package casper, which is executing this line:

mount ${cowdevice} -t ${cow_fstype} -o rw,noatime,mode=755 /cow || panic "Can not mount $cowdevice on /cow"

The reason this fails is because mode=755 is an illegal option for my fs type, ext2. This option is only allowed on affs, devpts, iso9660 and tmpfs. Obviously, casper was written to be used from a CD, so it makes sense that iso9660 is a supported file system. However, I want to run a live, persistent system where casper-rw is ext2.

My question: is this a bug in the casper package, or should I replace casper with live-initramfs? That is, maybe this is the reason for the fork?

FYI, if I manually mount the casper-rw partition (by leaving off the mode= option), then exit from ash, bootup proceeds normally, and all works as expected.

Thanks for any insight.

Justin