[McInen]

Hi!

I experiment with XBMC Live on USB stick. The PC has Win7 as "normal" OS.

I have removed "nodiskmount" from the syslinux.cfg so the system maps my disks with the media OK. I can add content from there.

I can also add my windows partition called DATA (on /dev/sda3) to Samba which I can then access from another Win PC fine.

However, after a reboot all the system the changes reset. Where to edit to make my smb.conf changes save to the USB stick?

Thank you!

edit: fixed typo in the subject

[outleradam]

Code:

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/live-rw bs=1M count=600
mkfs.ext3 -F /mnt/live-rw

from:http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=62488

[McInen]

Thank you for the tip! I swear I looked at that HOW-TO along many others but somehow the key words esacped my eyes...

Still, I made the live-rw file (actually tried it both ways: from windows and from the linux command line) but the changes I make still won't save.

The things I want to do are: change root password, update smb.conf and run apt-get update/upgrade just for the fun of it.

It should be noted that I'm using the ISO file from XBMCfreaks:
http://www.xbmcfreak.nl/en/xbmcfreak-generic-beta4/
Does that matter?

[McInen]

Ok, tested this also with the official Live image "xbmc-9.11-live-repack" and still no go with the permanent storage on USB

Does one have to do anything else except add this live-rw file to the root of the USB pen drive? Some config?

[McInen]

What can be wrong?
- Made the Live USB stick (4Gb) with Unetbootin (boots ok)
- Made the "live-rw" file (1Gb) with Toporesize, used ext3 format
- Copied it to the root of the USB stick
- Boots OK

Not working.. nothing saves permanently, except XBMC's data like contents.

[McInen]

Just to make sure, is the /dev/sda1 in this example representing the USB flash drive?

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt

In my PC /dev/sda1 is actually the first partition of the internal hard drive (containing a hidden Win7 recovery partition).

In my case the USB flash drive is sdc so I have to mount /dev/sdc1, right? Ok, I do that and create the live-rw file, format it to ext3 but my changes are still not persistent.

I've seen examples where the persisent save file is named as "live-rw" or "ext3fs.img". Does that matter?

I really wonder how does the system know that what is the writable file it can use if we don't need to define it anywhere?

Sorry for bringing this up again, it must be a mundane matter for everyone else...