Live/portable USB

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi, I’m trying to follow this :Live USB stick - openSUSE

When I run the script (this is on PCLinuxOS) at the end, to make a portable USB, I get this:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4047.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): Command action
   e   extended
   p   primary partition (1-4)
Partition number (1-4): First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): Value out of range.
First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): Value out of range.
First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): First cylinder (679-4047, default 679): Using default value 679
Last cylinder, +cylinders or +size{K,M,G} (679-4047, default 4047): Using default value 4047

Command (m for help): 
got EOF thrice - exiting..
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
8192 bytes (8.2 kB) copied, 8.367e-05 s, 97.9 MB/s

This don’t look too healthy to my untrained eye (all those ‘value out of range’) and it looks like there is still only one partition (I think)…

# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 4244 MB, 4244373504 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 4047 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x651d5702

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           1         678      694272   83  Linux

Clarification or help much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

2

No idea why the script didn’t work but I stepped through it by hand and it seems to be working. :slight_smile:

One other question, if I change this and do an install from it, will it install my modifications?

3

:frowning:

I take it back, it isn’t working. Whenever I try to download and install new packages, the entire system just hangs on installation.

Nothing works at all - forced power off is the only option.

Any ideas?

4

What you have is a Live CD image this by definition runs out of a RAM disk. So you could be simply running out of memory.

5

Well, I guess. However, from the article I linked before:

"By default, your USB stick will behave like a live cd: when you poweroff, all data are gone. By creating a new partition which the Live system is able to write to, openSUSE becomes portable: an operating system that you can use on any computer. "
Live USB stick - openSUSE

Now, as far as trivial changes are concerned, this appears to be the case. I can change the desktop wallpaper and the menu style and they persist through power off.

I thought, therefore, that I had the whole of the rest of the USB drive (3GB or so), to play with, which should be plenty?!

Can running out of memory cause a total lockup?

6

Running out of disk space can lock things up.

Also a memory stick is not a drive. Because of the way flash works writing and rewriting a lot of stuff can actually damage the flash memory. So cache files should be kept to the RAM disk. Since installing software uses cache files and temp files a lot, this can consume a significant amount of disk space. Then Lunix tends to do a great deal of logging which consumes space.