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Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

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opale7000
Posts: 32
Joined: 2017-06-20 18:48

Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#1 Post by opale7000 »

Hell Debian fans

Is there a guide/tutorial that explains how to make a bootable usb key with Debian Live with persistence?

Thanks

arochester
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Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#2 Post by arochester »

From Windows? From Linux?

opale7000
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Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#3 Post by opale7000 »

From windows or Linux. I have both.

arochester
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Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#4 Post by arochester »

One of the best sources of information used to be pendrivelinux https://www.pendrivelinux.com/ Look at the box at the bottom "USB Linux Installation Tutorials."

Also look at https://www.linux.com/blog/creating-deb ... on-techies ---obviously change the source to Debian 9.

opale7000
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Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#5 Post by opale7000 »

Thanks very much. I will have a look.

opale7000
Posts: 32
Joined: 2017-06-20 18:48

Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#6 Post by opale7000 »

Followed all the steps. When I hit esc key and type: live persistent. I get an error . At,least I tried.

thriftee
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Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#7 Post by thriftee »

The post there was from 2011, for Debian 6.0
Too many computers to list. I wonder if there is a moral in there somewhere?

ruffwoof
Posts: 298
Joined: 2016-08-20 21:00

Re: Debian 9 Live USB with persistence

#8 Post by ruffwoof »

https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#live-cd

https://www.debian.org/CD/live/

You might to better using the 'unofficial' versions that include non-free firmware
https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unoff ... -firmware/
i.e. for amd64 (64 bit), pick one from (lxde perhaps as that's pretty lightweight)
https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unoff ... so-hybrid/

Burn (write to USB) ...

https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-windows
https://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-unix

I don't know if those images are setup for persistence. Generally for persistence you need a partition that has a label of persistence along with a persistence.conf file in the root of that partition that contains

Code: Select all

union /
Or a ext2/3/4 file filesystem that's called persistence and contains that persistence.conf file within it. Generally its better to have that persistence partition/file on HDD as writing all changes to USB can be relatively slow by comparison.

For a file filesystem you need to do something like
dd if=/dev/zero of=persistence bs=1M count=2000 # for 2GB save file
mkfs.ext3 -F persistence
to create the file filesystem

then mount it

mkdir m
mount persistence m

and create a persistence.conf file within that

cd m
echo / union >persistence.conf
echo >>persistence.conf

(note the second empty echo just ensures there is the required blank line after the first line as it wont work without a newline after the union)

then unmount
cd ..
umount m

Provided that persistence file filesystem is in a root folder at bootup and the kernel boot parameter includes 'persistence' (without the quotes), the bootup should pickup on that and preserve all changes across reboots. Again however I'm uncertain whether the liveCD iso's do/include all of that already (if so the above is invalidated by that). Basically I don't use the liveCD myself, but just add live-boot to a existing full install and make my own filesystem.squashfs from that in a new live folder
mkdir /live
cd /live
mksquashfs / filesystem.squashfs -e live
... and then I boot that (I use grub4dos as a bootloader)

title Debian
find --set-root /live/filesystem.squashfs
kernel /vmlinuz boot=live persistence
initrd /initrd.img

A persistence file filesystem is best if stored on a ext (linux) partition. It can be a ntfs partition, but that might involve other things, such as correctly having the ntfs filesystem mounted with the correct parameters. I have ran things that way myself in the past but hit periodic problems where IIRC it depends upon how Windows is shutdown (full close or hibernate) ... perhaps best avoided.

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