Create a Larger than 4GB Casper Partition
The following tutorial will show you one way to create a casper-rw partition on your USB flash drive. The benefit of using a casper-rw partition as opposed to a casper-rw block file is that you can expand your persistent storage beyond 4GB. This is very useful if you have a flash drive that is 8GB or larger and you want to use all of its remaining space for persistent storage. The drawback is that Windows will not see the secondary casper-rw partition (in Windows, your drive will appear to be smaller than it is).
This tutorial assumes that you have already created a bootable USB Flash Drive that contains Ubuntu or an Ubuntu based Live Distro like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, Crunchbang, etc. You should delete any existing casper-rw file from the drive to free up all available space before proceeding.
- Restart your Computer, booting from an Ubuntu Live CD
- Once booted, insert the Flash Drive containing your Ubuntu based Live Distro
- Navigate to System > Administration > GParted
- select your USB device from the drop-down
Select the partition and then right click and select Unmount
- Right mouse click again and select Resize/Move
- Now drag the size down to what you want to limit for the first partition
- Now select the "unallocated entry"
Right mouse click and select New
- From the Create New Partition Window that appears, type casper-rw for the label and then click Add
- Now click the Checkmark to Apply all operations
- Once the pending operations have completed, simply close the Window and restart Booting from your Flash Drive
If all went well, you should now be running your Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Live Distro from your Flash Drive that now uses a second ext2 partition for storing your changes.
