Hi, [email protected] wrote: > The documentation suggests to > cp iso to /dev/sdX > Then add a partition to /dev/sdX for persistent storage. > > This does not work. If you cp or dd the iso to the block device the block > device is identified as an ISO and you can not add a partition to it.
Which partition editor exactly refuses to add a partition after plainly copying the ISO onto a disk-like storage device ? What are its refusal messages ? > If you partition the block device first then cp or dd the iso to the > /dev/sdX1 it sometimes works and boot This would be a surprise. Are you sure that it was not other software which booted ? > [...] writing partitions to a partition > is a very edge case thing. Actually this is not supposed to make the partitions within the ISO visible as partitions of the storage device. What partition table type was used ? MBR/DOS or GPT ? > I tried a lot of things to produce a usb disk where the iso and the > persistent storage were both on the same device Did you already consider to add a partition by writing a few bytes to the MBR/DOS partition table of the Debian-Live ISO ? The new partition entry would consist of 16 bytes beginning at byte 478 of the ISO image. It is quite a safe bet that this century's firmware will ignore the C/H/S fields. So you'd have to fill in only partition type (e.g. 0x83), LBA of first absolute sector, and number of sectors. The latter two are little-endian 32 bit numbers counting blocks of 512 bytes size. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record section Partition table entries Have a nice day :) Thomas
