Problems when creating Live-boot usb stick

[Richard Shaw]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:38 AM, Abu Attar Musharih
<abuattar.musharih at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I made a live bootable  Fedora-13 on Buffalo 8G  usb stick  using Linux command
>
>> dd if=Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso of=/dev/sdb1
>
> It was successful apart from no longer able to copy any file on  it.
> The live Fedora only occupied 700M while the media is 8G.
>
> I got the following message when trying to copy  a file on it, even if
> with the root privilege.
>
>>  cp mag01.doc /media/Fedora-13-i686-Live/
> cp: cannot create regular file `/media/Fedora-13-i686-Live/mag01.doc':
> Read-only file system

When you copied the image directly onto the device you in effect
destroyed the exisiting file system, that's the downside to using the
"dd" method.

> I removed any existing partition using /sbin/fdisk and  reformatted
> with  command line
>
> /sbin/mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb
>
> What I have now   is a single partition with only 6.8 Gb free space.

I think you should have used:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1

>
> The question, how can I recover  the original volume amount, 8G. If
> this is related to the file systems (ext3), which one should I choose
> so the volume get back to the original.
>
> Thanks for any kind of response.

You seem to be fairly comfortable using the command line, but a
graphical tool would make this much easier to see what's going on. I
would install "gparted" if you're using gnome or "qtparted" and
repartition & reformat from there.

Also, if you would like to have access from a windows machine I would
reformat as FAT32. Actually in retrospect, I believe the
liveusb-creator tool[1] will format it for you and will allow you to
setup a persistent overlay so changes can be saved. Keep in mind it's
not that intelligent, from what I understand it just records block
changes from the livecd image and does not reuse any part of the
overlay, i.e. changes will continue to be tracked until the entire
overlay is used up at which point it is automatically dropped as a
fail-safe.

Richard

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo