I’m trying to figure out how to use live-fat-stick with a FAT formatted USB drive that supports hybrid persistence.
If I create a bootable ISO with the --isohybrid and I add the kiwi_hybridpersistent=true to the boot options, then the system will boot and it creates the COW partition as it should.
However, isohybrid creates an ISO9660 partition type that can’t be written too.
What I’d like to do is use the live-fat-stick with a FAT partition but still have it use a COW file/partition. This doesn’t seem to work as adding the kiwi_hybridpersistent=true doesn’t do anything.
I can’t help you much, but I had a similar experience. While I used live-fat-stick to make a bootable image of an otherwise unbootable recent Tumbleweed snapshot, I didn’t manage to have persistence working.
The only way I was able to make persistence work on recent suse hybrids was by burning the image with suse-studio imagewriter, which created an FAT boot partition, an UDF partition for the iso image and finally an EXT4 hybrid for persistence on the remaining free space.
This is how kiwi_hybridpersistent is designed to work, so you need to use imagewriter/live-fat-stick --isohybrid/dd/dd_rescue etc(same result for all those commands). to get read-only iso and persistent COW partitions. If you use live-fat-stick --suse on vfat partitioned usb stick you can store your files and work on them after mounting the usb stick from the user session in live mode. The changes to stored files will be persistent, however the system changes will not be.
Use susestudio.com to get customized distribution so you do not need system modification persistence.
Added --suse-persistent and --ubuntu-persistent options to live-fat-stick/live-grub-stick/live-usb-gui. These options will create a cowfile to use as persistent data storage on partition where iso is copied.
Why do you want a cow filesystem on a fat usb stick?
You can do a “normal” install on the usb stick. That is: partition the stick and make a ext4 (or similar) partition and install opensuse on it, grub2 included at the mbr of the stick.
Then you add the noatime option to / mount options in /etc/fstab and it will work fine.