LiveDVD-Persistence-Mode

The information in this article has been deprecated. It may or may not be relevant for contemporary usage. Handle with care!

This HOWTO explains how to setup persistence on the liveDVD media.

Introduction

Persistence Mode

The latest Gentoo LiveDVD offers the option of using persistence to store changes on the USB. It uses aufs to layer a read-write file system on top of a read-only squashfs compressed file system. This is great, because it allows you to make changes to the livedvd and have those changes appear on future reboots.

Requirements

In order to have persistent data on the latest livedvd you will need to meet the following requirements

1. At least 256M of free writable space available
2. Writable device i.e (usb stick, hard drive or ssd)

Setup Instructions

Writable partition

You need to setup a writable file system on the existing usb stick that you use to boot your livedvd, by creating an extra primary partition. This assumes you already ran

root #dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=8192k

on your usb stick but these instructions can work on any writable media. This HOWTO assumes your writable device is /dev/sdc.

1. Create the primary partition on /dev/sdc
   root #fdisk /dev/sdc
2. Create file system. We will assume that partition is /dev/sdc4
3. root #mke2fs -t ext2 -L aufs-rw /dev/sdc4

Boot liveDVD

You may now boot your media and when prompted for the kernel to use, edit the kernel line and add (aufs=/dev/sdc4) everytime you boot the system, this will allow persistence and write all changes into /dev/sdc4.