Poor mans Install and Persistant home

[jaykay]

Hi All

I have recently done a poor mans install of Knoppix 3.4 to my machine ( as I love the idea of an unbreakable system and that using a persistant home I can simply use klik to download progs and delete them as required with no probs)

I have installed the cd image to hda1 and have made a persistant home on hda5, and save my config file also to hda5.

the problem comes when I reboot, I am using the cheatcodes for home and conf but when I go to home directory it is empty, as though everything that I have saved has been saved to ramdisk and cleared when rebooting, even though I have created a particion as a persitant home HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP please

Am I missiing something here !!!

Can some one out there please please offer me some idea of where to look or what the problem may be. I have tried every thing that I can and have run out of ideas.

I know my way around a linux system but am at a loss as to what is going on here.

Many Thanks

Jaykay

[gnarvaja]

The details vary depending on which PMI did you do. I use the Pivot Root Install for one PC, I will assume you use the regular installation.

When you boot the system your shell default directory will be /ramdisk/home/knoppix instead of /home/knoppix. The latter one is your persistent one. Try using the command pwd to verify which is your default directory. Make sure than when you copy or installing anything in your home directory, you are working on the persistent one.

When you re-boot, everything in the persistent /home/knoppix directory will be copied to the volatile /ramdisk/home/knoppix one. I don't know what happens when the contents in your home directory exceed your /ramdisk capacity.

I hope this helps

-GN

[jaykay]

For anyone reading this I have now solved this problem.

If you are doing a basic poor mans install You MUST set the persistant home directory before you copy your CD knoppix image to the hard drive.
Procedure as follows.

1. boot up as normal from cd and set the persitant home Kmenu-knoppix-configure-create PH Directory

2. Reboot and then use the "knoppix tohd=/dev/xxxx (where x is your PH location" cheatcode and let knoppix copy the image to HD.

3. reboot, but I have found that you must specify the "fromhd" cheatcode BEFORE you specifiy the home=/dev/xxxx or home=scan cheat. now you should be up and running with your poor mans install, all you need to do now is save your configuration file for when you next reboot. using kmenu-knoppix-configure-create configuartion file

Hope this may help some one at some point

[Mercury 4063]

I've tried that and it works fine, but every time you logout, do you have to re-save your config and home for next boot?

[jaykay]

Mercury 4063

No once you have set your persistant home, thats it, it will autosave your new items just like a hard drive particion in a standard os hard drive install. you will however have to resave your config file if you make any changes to your settings, desktop items etc.

Hope that helps

jim