mk-image on fat32 - 4GB file size limit?
Hey,
Still getting my feet wet on this using the persistent image on an 8GB USB flash drive thing. I think I destroyed the initial Sandisk Cruiser 8GB stick I did this with and successfully got it exchanged for another one. All I know is that after fooling around with it for a few days I could no longer format, zero it out, make partitions, copy anything to what the file manager showed as existing partitions, it was just apparently unusable.
Having seen the script fail anytime I tried making the image greater than the 4GB Fat32 limit I made it 3.6GB or so and that had worked.
In my stupidity or just to see how much space it would take to do so, I tried upgrading Knoppix with a full-upgrade using aptitude (keep-all first). Wow! That thing got nearly the whole hundreds of packages upgraded before finally farting out with only a bit left, telling that there just wasn't any disk space to proceed further.
Well, of course I won't do that again! I have Debian installed so use that mostly and am just seeing about making a portable system using Knoppix 5.3.1 DVD and a persistent USB image. First time was play time but I now want to do it right!
What I don't understand was why deleting that filled 3.6 GB knoppix.img file never got it deleted. using dd to zero out the drive reported it zeroed out but the image file still remained on the stick. QTParted could not do any operations (formatting, deleting the partition, anything). I even tried booting into Vista with it, where I had originally used the Sandisk software to uninstall the q3 software from it. Vista mounted it but could not open the drive in Explorer and its Disk Management could not open if I had the drive attached. I just exchanged the drive for a new one and have now uninstalled the q3 software, and so have a fresh start hoping that I do not destroy this one.
Not sure how that drive got messed up, but I'm thinking how I could make the persistent image larger than 4GB. I do not intend to upgrade the entire DVD system, so won't need that kind of space, but I do have lots of mp3's (about 18GB) and I might decide to keep a few GB of those on the persistent image, plus perhaps a few packages of additional software and some upgrades at times. So I'd like to use most of the drive.
Would deleting the partition, creating a new one, and formatting it as ext2 or ext3 enable Knoppix to create a larger than 4GB persistent knoppix.img file? I suppose I could use qtparted for this? Not sure whether I'll choose to do that or not. I might just do a 3899 (max fat32 size, right?) persistent knoppix.img and simply copy some mp3's over to the rest of the partition and play them from there.
I don't trust fooling around too much with repartitioning and formatting because of my experience with the first drive. I had thought that partition manipulation was going to be about the same as on a real hard drive, where I've never really had a problem with that. But these flash drives appear to be quite sensitive. It would be nice to just leave it alone and use the Fat32 it comes with, but I am still pondering using ext2 or 3 for a larger knoppix.img IF that is possible and relatively safe to do.
