Problem creating a persistent home directory

[hawkeye]

Hi everybody,
I just bought a USB drive, which shows up just fine, is mounted, but when I try to create a persistent home dir, the drive doesn't show up as a choice. Any ideas before I muck around with fdisk? It's FAT16 right now, does it need to be something else?

Thanks for the help,
Hawkeye

[hawkeye]

OK, I've found out what's going on, and although I don't know what's probably the right fix, here's a workaround that hasn't given me any problems:

The problem seems to be with how the 2.6 kernel changes USB drives from /dev/sd* to /dev/ub*. Becuase of that, the 'persistent home directory' ultility doesn't show the USB drive, it's looking for USB drives under /dev/sd* . So with Knoppix 3.7, boot using the 2.4 kernel (just the defualt), and use the utility to create a home directory on your USB drive. Then when you want to use the 2.6 kernel (which for me is almost a must with it's improved hardware detection), just use the cheat code on boot 'knoppix26 home=/dev/uba1/knoppix.img' (replace the /dev/uba1 with the proper location if your USB drive shows up as a different device and the knoppix.img with whatever you called your image.). Unfortunently, it seems that you can't simply use the code 'home=scan'. The bootloader doesn't automatically look for a home directory on /dev/ub* devices. But you're good to go with a persistent home directory on a USB drive using the 2.6 kernel on a Knoppix 3.7 CD!

Note: It's just easier to set up an image on part of the USB drive than to format the whole drive and use it as a home directory. This way, you can save documents to the rest of USB drive which can be read on a windows machine (as long as the USB drive is FAT or FAT32).