[Bio-linux-dev] Corruption of persistent filesystem on USB-stick

[Tony Travis]

On 28/02/14 13:51, Tim Booth wrote:
> Hi Tony,
>
> Thanks for the patch.  I'd thought about the 4GB limit in regard to
> image size but totally forgot about casper-rw.  I'm surprised to see it
> manifest as filesystem corruption without warning though - I'd expect to
> see an error during the USB stick creation.
>
> Let me know if it fixes the issues and I'll patch the package.

Hi, Tim.

Limiting the size of casper-rw to 4095 MiB does NOT fix the problem, but
creating a separate partition of the disk for casper-rw DOES!

The corrupted sticks could still be booted read-only if you edit the
GRUB command-line by pressing F6 at the boot menu and remove the work
"persistent". The problem might be to do with using FAT32 to store a
casper-rw container file, but ext3 is more robust if the filesystem is
not sync'ed properly on shutdown. I had similar problems with the USB
sticks I created for the NuGO project, but we thought that was due to
using poor quality USB sticks.

There has been quite a lot of discussion about this on the Internet, but
it doesn't BITE unless you make non-trivial use of the casper-rw.

Attached is my patch for manually partitioned USB-ticks. I'll post
another patch when I've added some code to re-partition the sticks.

Bye,

  Tony.

--
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and
Environmental Sciences, Cruickshank Building, St. Machar Drive, Aberdeen
AB24 3UU, Scotland, UK. tel +44(0)1224 272700, fax +44 (0)1224 272 396
http://www.abdn.ac.uk, mailto:tony.travis at abdn.ac.uk, skype:ajtravis
The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013683.
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