Douglas McClendon <dmc.fedora@filteredperception.or wrote:

>If that doesn't help or answer you question, try to add more detail to
>your question.

Douglas -

Thanks for the reply.  

I use the live usb tools to create my live USB stick with a 2047 MB overlay.  I boot from it and let it run updates. I reboot the LiveUSB to make sure it still boots, then I shut down.  I boot a system on a copy of Fedora 9 on the hard drive and plug in my Live USB so I can see the files on my USB stick.  

I see 2 folders:
LiveOS
and
syslinux

in the LiveOS folder I see three files:
osmin.img
overlay-FEDORA-3099-53F2
and
squashfs.img

======
assumptions

squashfs.img looks to be the size of the live iso
overlay-FEDORA-3099-53F2 looks to be the size of the overlay and has overlay in the file name
osmin.img is only 8k probably a boot strap, I'm not sure.
=======

I'm sorry, I can't find anything on the LiveUSB file structure on the WiKi.  I've signed on as a writer for the Fedore project so I'd like to write it once I figure out what it is.

I was hoping that I could backup the overlay file and the syslinux folder from my completely updated LiveUSB stick and restore them to a newly built LiveUSB from my backup.

> I'm not entirely sure what you mean.  One thing that is possible is to
> copy the overlay file from one liveusb and put it on another.  Though
> the format of the overlay file is inherently tied to the specific liveos
> it was originally with.  I.e. you won't be able to copy an overlay file
> from an f9-x86 liveusb onto an f9-x64 or f10-x86 liveusb.  Or even a
> customized f9-x86 liveusb that you created with livecd-creator/tools.
Nothing fancy - The same USB stick, built in the same way with the same iso and the same overlay size.

The overlay file name changes.  I've given the updated file (the overlay that was part of the LiveUSB for all of the updates) the same name as the new file that is created and left the updated file with its original name. I've overwritten just the overlay itself and the overlay and every combinarion of the osmin.img and squashfs.img files.

I could never get it to boot.  The boot starts but then hangs.

Ideally, it would be great to specify the overlay and the syslinyx folder that goes with that overlay in the command line to build the LiveUSB.

At this point I would be thrilled if I could get a set of manual steps together to have an updated system without going through the update process.  I loose a day each time.

> From an engineering standpoint, of course anything is possible.  One
> use case I see, is to use the persistence feature to add an entry to
> fstab, such that say, /mnt/data mounts to a ext3fs image located on a
> file on your liveusb.  You can then add a user that has a home directory
> under there, and perhaps install applications under there.  In this way,
> you could then copy that ext3fs image file to an f10 liveusb, and then
> only have to re-do the fstab and passwd modifications, such that
> everything now pretty much looks the same.
Your suggestion of building a file structure that would transcend different releases would be awesome but alas I need to crawl before I can run.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again

Martin

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