No persistance on USB flash drive

[Terry]

I followed the instructions from wiki to boot off a thumb drive, /dev/sda1. I used unetbootin after downloading the .iso in Win7.

I can boot into TCL and the system runs great, amazing distro! However after a reboot, no apps I downloaded persist. So I tried adding:

waitusb=5 tce=sda1 home=sda1

at the boot prompt. But this gives an error:

unable to mount /dev/sda1

The system still continues to boot. But no tce and home folders have been created.
Were we supposed to create a 2nd partition on the USB stick for persistant folders? Right now its formatted fat32. Does it have to be ext3?

Thanks for a great distro. Posting from SliTaz.

Terry

[jur]

sda1 is your local hard drive.

In a terminal, type 'blkid'. Your usb drive should be listed along with its designation, such as sdb1.

Use its designation instead of sda1, such as 'tce=sdb1'.

Home can't be specified on a fat partition. It will have to be ext3. You can continue to use fat (16 or 32) but important files in your home will need to be backed up.

[maro]

Well it looks like that /dev/sda1 was not the right "guess" as to which device represents your USB drive.

I'd suggest to re-boot into TC and have a look into what TC has recognised in term of devices:
cat /etc/fstab
If you have difficulties it might help to compare labels (and UUIDs) with:
blkid /dev/sd*

If you still struggle, post the results of those commands here.

Note 1: You might need to increase the waitusb value, but first figure out which device your USB drive is.
Note 2: You might want to use tce=UUID=ABCD-1234 (with the correct value as reported by blkid).

EDIT: Sorry, just realised that Jur had meanwhile posted along the same lines.
Further note: /dev/sdX is used for SATA drives and USB drives, /dev/hdX is used for IDE (old parallel ATA) devices

[Terry]

Thanx guys, fstab showed /dev/sdc1.
I was mixing up sdxy and hdxy 'coz I'm on an old Dell (2002) IDE Box right now.

I am seeing persistance now to sdc1, but only if i enter the boot parameters:

waitusb=5 tce=sdc1 home=sdc1 restore=sdc1 vga=376

Logout with backup is saving new extensions (apps to me) for use on next boot without having to re-install.

Then I followed the wiki instructions to edit syslinux.cfg appending the same boot options to the kernel line.

This does not find the saved apps on sdc1. Result is a clean destop with no new extensions on wbar. A ls of /mnt/sdc1 shows no files mounted. But the apps are there, 'coz a reboot loads them if I manually type in the same boot options at the boot prompt.

Can i shrink the fat32 partition and add ext3 to move /mnt/sdc1/tce and /mnt/sdc1/home? Is that what syslinux.cfg needs to find persistant apps?

Thnx,
Terry

[jur]

In syslinux, the boot options need to be on the other line:

Code: [Select]

APPEND initrd=/tce/tinycore.gz quiet max_loop=255 waitusb=5 tce=UUID="E98A-5B55"
where tce is the directory where tinycore.gz is located. (I am using tce=UUID="XXXX-XXXX" to make it independent of what machine I'm booting off.) I am using fat32, and back up any files in home that are not re-created on boot or are edited from the defaults.

[Terry]

Yes that did it, thank-you!
The boot options have to go on the initrd line, not the kernel line as mentioned in the wiki under Unetbootin. Hope this helps someone else.

After your excellent suggestion, I tried replacing sdc1 with UUID as reported by blkid. This did not work for me, just locked up and failed to boot.

[maro]

Did you use tce=UUID=XXXX-YYYY (no quotes or double quotes)?

[Terry]

LOL yes I tried without then tried with quotes. Same affect.

Here's something completely off-topic.
After rebooting replacing UUID with sdc1, system came up OK. Then the first thing you need is a Browser, so d'l Chromium.
No problems with the download. Click icon on wbar, nothing happens. From aterm, enter - chromium-browser - and output is a fail to load with a singletonlock.

A subsequent reboot into cloud mode only (no sdc1 persistant tce or home) and then d/l and install and Chromium loads up OK.

Wonder if it's something to do with sdc1 being Fat32?

-Terry

[jur]

No, I also use chromium on my fat32 usb drive.

[yoshi314]

when i tried UUID mounts it turned out appbrowser would download packages into home directory, and no tce dir was created on the usb stick.  

also the tce partition was not mounted after boot (i think it should have been). i also don't have /dev/disk/by-uuid directory, which might explain why UUID mounts do not work.

when i booted off usb, it turned out to be /dev/sdb, not /dev/sda which took me by surprise. that's why i opted for UUID mounts.

i'm  using ext2 partition on 2gb memory stick pro duo. and extlinux bootloader.

[roberts]

UUID and LABELS are used only as boot codes to ensure that the proper device is used to boot and load from. After boot typical device letters are used.

[Juanito]

and extlinux bootloader.

Ah-ha, so at least one other person uses it then

[Terry]

Got chromium to work by deleting the boot option: home=sdc1
So boot options:

        tce=sdc1 restore=sdc1

However, if restore=sdc1 is omitted, only a fresh desktop is presented - none of the apps I've saved show up in wbar. In fact, ls /mnt/sdc1 reports no files.

So restore seems needed at boot. The reason I was adding home=sdc1 is 'coz that's what the Core Concepts page of the website said in the last paragraph on Persistant Home: "The boot option must always be used, as there is no autoscaning available for persistent home."

Anyway, making progress with TCL.
Terry

[roberts]

There's the easy way and then there is the hard way.
Why most choose the latter is hard for me to understand.

You can't afford to burn a cd to have Tiny Core make a properly configured pendrive?

You could even use unetbootin to boot up Tiny Core with base norestore and turn around run the usbinstall script to make a properly configured pendrive. But no. That would be too easy.

Don't Ignore What's In Core.

[Terry]

@Roberts
LOL, I had no idea this was the hard way. It was one of the methods described in wiki:

        http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Installing+TC+on+USB

under Section 4 Unetbootin

So I will take your advice and start over from a CD install.
Thnx,
Terry