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#1 2021-01-05 11:30:10

Ralf
Member
From: Ruhrgebiet
Registered: 2013-03-15
Posts: 44

[solved][Ventoy] Trouble making an USB stick with a persistence file

Hi,

I try to make an USB stick providing a Linux dual-boot or multi-boot, all Linux with persistence supported by files.

I tried with aur/ventoy-bin 1.0.31-1, but I'm willing to test anything else, too. For testing purpose I'm using just one Xubuntu ISO. Booting into a live session works without issues, but persistence doesn't work. Actually the Ventoy menu only shows one Xubuntu entry, no persistence related entry at all.

At first I run

# ventoy -i -r 13615 -L v1.ventoy /dev/sdf

then I used gparted to reformat the exFAT partition to Ext4 and of cause copied the ISO to the USB stick.

"you can reformat the 1st partition with other filesystem, exFAT/FAT32/NTFS/UDF/XFS/Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 are supported"

After that I wanted to add persistence, taking into account that "The persistent file/partition name in Ubuntu 20.04 has been officially changed from  casper-rw  to  writable " by running

# /opt/ventoy/CreatePersistentImg.sh -s 6400 -t ext4 -l writable
# mv -i persistence.dat xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat

This was the first used and probably faulty ventoy.json:

# cat /mnt/VTOYEFI/ventoy/ventoy.json 
{
    "persistence": [
        {
            "image": "xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso",
            "backend": "xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat"
        }
    ]
}

Editing it to

# cat /mnt/VTOYEFI/ventoy/ventoy.json 
{
    "persistence": [
        {
            "image": "/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso",
            "backend": "/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat"
        }
    ]
}

didn't make a difference. This is how the USB stick does look like:

# lsblk -o name,mountpoint,label,size,fstype /dev/sdf 
NAME   MOUNTPOINT     LABEL      SIZE FSTYPE
sdf                             29.3G 
├─sdf1 /mnt/v1.ventoy v1.ventoy   16G ext4
├─sdf2 /mnt/VTOYEFI   VTOYEFI     32M vfat (fat16)
└─sdf3 /mnt/V1FAT32   V1FAT32   13.3G vfat (fat32)
# /usr/bin/ls -hAl /mnt/{V1FAT32,VTOYEFI,v1.ventoy} 
/mnt/V1FAT32:
total 0

/mnt/VTOYEFI:
total 8.0K
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 2.0K Dec 23 11:23 EFI
drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 2.0K Dec 23 11:23 grub
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2.0K Dec 23 11:23 tool
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 2.0K Jan  5 10:44 ventoy

/mnt/v1.ventoy:
total 7.9G
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.6G Jul 31 18:51 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.3G Jan  5 06:55 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat

I only edited /mnt/VTOYEFI/ventoy/ventoy.json , all other directories or files stay with the defaults. FWIW I didn't test  casper-rw . I suspect an user error.

I'll already started a thread at Ubuntu users, but got no reply. In addition I subscribed to Ventoy Forums and wait for activation. If the issue gets solved, I'll report back to the mailing list, this forum and if I should post to the other forum, I'll not miss to post a solution there, too.

Regards,
Ralf

Last edited by Ralf (2021-01-07 16:24:16)

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#2 2021-01-05 13:42:59

WorMzy
Forum Moderator
From: Scotland
Registered: 2010-06-16
Posts: 11,788
Website

Re: [solved][Ventoy] Trouble making an USB stick with a persistence file

Mod note: Moving to AUR Issues.


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Making lemonade from lemons since 2015.

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#3 2021-01-06 03:07:20

longpanda
Member
From: China
Registered: 2021-01-06
Posts: 1
Website

Re: [solved][Ventoy] Trouble making an USB stick with a persistence file

ventoy.json should be put in the 1st partition (the bigger partition) not the 32MB VTOYEFI partition.
So firstly you need to create a ventoy directory maunally under /mnt/v1.ventoy and then put the ventoy.json there. That's /mnt/v1.ventoy/ventoy/ventoy.json

The 32MB VTOYEFI partition is only for ventoy internal use.

Last edited by longpanda (2021-01-06 03:12:12)

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#4 2021-01-06 14:08:46

Ralf
Member
From: Ruhrgebiet
Registered: 2013-03-15
Posts: 44

Re: [solved][Ventoy] Trouble making an USB stick with a persistence file

Thank you longpanda,

now the Ventoy menu shows "xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso" and when choosing it, the choice between "Boot without persistence" and "Boot with /xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat" follows. However, when booting with "/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat", then after a restart nothing is kept. Since the default user "xubuntu", UID 999 might be kind of a guest account, that anyway does forget everything, I added a user "ventoy", UID 1000. After a reboot the user is gone. I'll try with "casper-rw" instead of "writable", when I've got time to continue.

Regards,
Ralf

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#5 2021-01-07 16:19:06

Ralf
Member
From: Ruhrgebiet
Registered: 2013-03-15
Posts: 44

Re: [solved][Ventoy] Trouble making an USB stick with a persistence file

Hi,

the short story, a ventoy update and/or using "casper-rw" instead of "writable" solved the issue.
Persistance works. The longs story:

 [root@archlinux rocketmouse]# rm -i /mnt/v1.ventoy/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat 
rm: remove regular file '/mnt/v1.ventoy/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat'? y
[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# ventoy -u /dev/sdf

**********************************************
      Ventoy: 1.0.32  x86_64
      longpanda admin@ventoy.net
      https://www.ventoy.net
**********************************************

Upgrade operation is safe, all the data in the 1st partition (iso files and other) will be unchanged!

Update Ventoy  1.0.31 ===> 1.0.32   Continue? (y/n)y

Update Ventoy to /dev/sdf successfully finished.

[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /opt/ventoy/CreatePersistentImg.sh -s 6400 -t ext4 -l casper-rw 
6400+0 records in
6400+0 records out
6710886400 bytes (6.7 GB, 6.2 GiB) copied, 16.8598 s, 398 MB/s
mke2fs 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
/dev/loop0 contains `ISO-8859 text, with very long lines, with no line terminators' data
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
Creating filesystem with 1638400 4k blocks and 409600 inodes
Filesystem UUID: b04bad04-215b-453a-aa74-36bd890a0617
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done 

[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# mv -i persistence.dat /mnt/v1.ventoy/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat

JFTR obviously the update unmounted at least /mnt/v1.ventoy/. The file was moved to /mnt/v1.ventoy/, but on my Arch install, not to the USB stick.
I didn't notice this in the first place and after a reboot run CreatePersistentImg.sh again.

[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /usr/bin/ls -hAl /mnt/v1.ventoy/
total 1.6G
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan  6 13:36 ventoy
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.6G Jul 31 18:51 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /usr/bin/ls -hAl /mnt/v1.ventoy/ventoy/
total 4.0K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 170 Jan  5 10:44 ventoy.json
[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /opt/ventoy/CreatePersistentImg.sh -s 6400 -t ext4 -l casper-rw 
6400+0 records in
6400+0 records out
6710886400 bytes (6.7 GB, 6.2 GiB) copied, 15.499 s, 433 MB/s
mke2fs 1.45.6 (20-Mar-2020)
/dev/loop0 contains `ISO-8859 text, with very long lines, with no line terminators' data
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
Creating filesystem with 1638400 4k blocks and 409600 inodes
Filesystem UUID: e090fccf-1492-4315-85b4-12ca1cae305f
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
	32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (16384 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done 

[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# mv -i persistence.dat /mnt/v1.ventoy/xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat 
[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /usr/bin/ls -hAl /mnt/v1.ventoy/
total 7.9G
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Jan  6 13:36 ventoy
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.6G Jul 31 18:51 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.3G Jan  7 16:43 xubuntu-20.04.1-desktop-pers1.dat
[root@archlinux rocketmouse]# /usr/bin/ls -hAl /mnt/v1.ventoy/ventoy/
total 4.0K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 170 Jan  5 10:44 ventoy.json

Thank you again longpanda. In the meantime my account at the Ventoy Forums is activated. Btw. longpanda is not only the moderator of the forums, see the quoted output of the commands. Fortunately I don't need to post this request there, too.

Regards,
Ralf

Last edited by Ralf (2021-01-07 16:38:09)

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