Hi!
I'm trying to have a debian-live USB drive with some additional data on an
extra partition.
Starting point:
* download debian-live-11.6.0-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso
* verify the sha256sum (correct)
* dd it to a 23GB USB mass storage
* verify it boots
Now my first attempt was to create an aditional partition in the free space
at the end of the medium, mark that as "LVM" type, and create a PV/VG and some LV
in it.
Suddenly, the medium didn't boot anymore. I still got the boot menu, but at some point
the "BOOT FAILED" screen, pointing to /boot.log (but that's empty) and the following
error message:
Unable to find a medium containing a live file system
That's weird given that the existing two partitions exist unmodified.
Removing that new third partition (with the PV/VG/LV in it) made the medium boot again.
Ok, then I though let's start from a documented setup and use
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianLive/LiveUsbPersistence
Just to be safe, I actually 'dd' the iso image again to the medium, then created a primary
partion for all of the free space, did a mkfs.ext4, set the label and added the persietence.conf
just like documented in above wiki.
However, same behavior. Boot fails, again with the "Unable to find" message.
See the partition table below:
========================================================================
Disk /dev/sdc: 29.81 GiB, 32010928128 bytes, 62521344 sectors
Disk model: SDDR-113
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x312b9e27
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1 * 0 3909119 3909120 1.9G 0 Empty
/dev/sdc2 1656 11729 10074 4.9M ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sdc3 3909632 62521343 58611712 27.9G 83 Linux
========================================================================
and the correct label in the partition:
========================================================================
nataraja:/# tune2fs -l /dev/sdc3
tune2fs 1.47.0 (5-Feb-2023)
Filesystem volume name: persistence
Last mounted on: <not available>
Filesystem UUID: 3cf1795a-3939-49bf-8d1e-5b9669b2bb03
Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53
Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype extent 64bit flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file dir_nlink extra_isize metadata_csum
Filesystem flags: signed_directory_hash
Default mount options: user_xattr acl
Filesystem state: clean
Errors behavior: Continue
Filesystem OS type: Linux
...
========================================================================
Is the wiki page outdated? What I don't understand is why the presence of any additional
partitions on the medium would make the initramfs fail to find the live file system
in the first partition?
The 'dmesg' log within the initramfs also shows the thre partitions as expected:
"sdb1, sdb2, sdb3" (yes, it's sdb3 on the machine I'm testing to boot, but was sdc on
the machine I used to install the drive).
Any ideas?