fc16 live usb persistent ?

[Carrot Cruncher]

hi. i have created a fc16 live usb stick used a 16gb usb flash drive as follows :

livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 1309 --home-size-mb 12288 Fedora-16-i686-Live-Desktop.iso /dev/sdc1

however, while the information in the home filesystem is persistent, nothing else is. eg.

contents of live user's home dir are retained after a reboot

amending the regional and clock settings are lost after a reboot

contents of root's home dir are lost after a reboot

contents of /var/cache/yum are lost after a reboot

any package updates are lost after a reboot

i know there is is a problem with previous releases due to a bug in dracut but as far as i can see the version included in fc16 does not have this bug.

is this a known problem, have i used the wrong command, or have i misunderstood how the overlay option works ? cheers.

[akshayvyas29]

use fedora live usb creater gui

[Carrot Cruncher]

thanks for the response. what does the gui give me that the command line doesn't ? cheers.

[himan0110]

I have installed FC16 on 16GB USB stick with almost 14GB of persistent space. But, after installing LibreOffice and few other utilities it got finished and shows me only 600MB of total space. Can someone please suggest where can I find rest of 13.5GB space?

[Roeten]

Same problem with this i was hoping you guys could help out, aka bump

[Carrot Cruncher]

just been testing livecd-iso-to-disk and liveusb-creator, and from checking the logs i see the following dracut messages :

livecd-iso-to-disk :
[ 2.073536] dracut: dracut-013-18.fc16
[ 2.098373] dracut: rd.luks=0: removing cryptoluks activation
[ 2.102298] dracut: root was live:/dev/disk/by-uuid/cdbf0bc1-c6dc-4909-920f-baf4b12ba7e0, liveroot is now live:UUID=cdbf0bc1-c6dc-4909-920f-baf4b12ba7e0
[ 3.714748] dracut: Starting plymouth daemon
[ 4.097804] dracut: rd.dm=0: removing DM RAID activation
[ 4.110841] dracut: rd.md=0: removing MD RAID activation
[ 7.499898] dracut Warning: Unable to find persistent overlay; using temporary
[ 13.151467] dracut: Mounted root filesystem /dev/mapper/live-rw
[ 13.306828] dracut: Switching root

liveusb-creator :
[ 2.123494] dracut: dracut-013-18.fc16
[ 2.543821] dracut: rd.luks=0: removing cryptoluks activation
[ 2.548606] dracut: root was live:/dev/disk/by-uuid/cd816d6c-a4b4-4113-9497-ae79f6bde235, liveroot is now live:UUID=cd816d6c-a4b4-4113-9497-ae79f6bde235
[ 4.159878] dracut: Starting plymouth daemon
[ 4.773059] dracut: rd.dm=0: removing DM RAID activation
[ 4.790131] dracut: rd.md=0: removing MD RAID activation
[ 11.159226] dracut: Mounted root filesystem /dev/mapper/live-rw
[ 11.289555] dracut: Switching root

not sure why it's not working when using livecd-iso-to-disk but the results above are consistent as i've tried it several times now.

the only way i've been able to create a usb stick with both a persistent overlay and a persistent home directory is :

1. run livecd-iso-to-disk using the --home-size-mb option.
2. copy the home.img file off the usb stick
3. run liveusb-creator specifying a persistent overlay
4. move the home.img file back onto the usb stick