Quote Originally Posted by utu View Post

I do not know how to repair the usb when it will not load correctly,
...
In my case, I am using the 'persistent home' feature.
I suspect that while I'm using Knoppix on usb, sometimes I may fill up the UNIONFS
beyond the 2Gb that the usb can hold, and when I log out the new persistent
image won't fit on my 2Gb usb. I intend to monitor the size of UNIONFS before I
shut down from now on. I've crashed twice this way, now.

If you discover how to salvage the usb, I'd like to know how.
What you are saying, in theory, it should not happen. But if it at all happens, it MUST be a software bug, or a physical corruption. Physical corruption will like be irrecoverable. If it can be recovered by wiping it out, then it points more likely that it is a SOFTWARE bug somewhere.

Why do I say that ? Because /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX is a read only file system, and it is aufs2-ed with /mnt-system/KNOPPIX/knoppix-data.img. Both of these are fixed sized. It will not grow, at run time, beyond it's pre-configured size.

It might not be worthwhile for you to investigate it down the software corruption problem, unless you intend to be a knoppix guru and so on. But if I were in that situation, I will do things like :-

a) Boot KNOPPIX CD, first run dosfsck or fsck.vfat and so on on the VFAT partition to check for possible VFAT corruption
b) Boot from KNOPPIX CD, manually cloop-mount the flash KNOPPIX compressed image, to see if that is possible to see the problem this way.
c) Boot from KNOPPIX CD, e2fsck on knoppix-data.img to check for corruption and possible loop mount it manually and check for corruption.

Cheers.