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2008-01-09 15:45:40

Need More LiveCD Space?

Most of you have read the article on how to create a custom Fedora LiveCD. Well, by default, Revisor creates the "filesystem" with a 3GB limit (2.8GB usable). I ran into this problem while trying to inject a 7GB VMWare image onto my LiveCD and getting a "filesystem full" error.
So let's refresh... When you mount the ISO you get the squashed filesystem, squashfs.img. You unsquash that with `unsquashfs` and are then presented with os.img. That is the actual filesystem. It was a blank file that Revisor created, added the system files to, fsck'd, then resized to 3GB. This was found by checking out /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/revisor/pilgrim.py, line 882. So, using the same commands, I fsck'd os.img:
# e2fsck -f os.img
Then I resized it to 10GB:
# resize2fs os.img 10485760K
Voila! Now your live filesystem can contain up to 10GB of data instead of the measly 3GB that was initially allocated.

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7 comments


2008-05-29 08:28:22


Matt says...
but....shouldn't the real limit be how much space the media has? 10GB of data on a liveCD doesn't do any good unless all you're doing is virtual machines, right?

2008-05-29 08:47:06


slonkak says...
Not necessarily. `squashfs` (the utility that compresses live CD filesystems) does an awesome job at compression. You get better than a 2:1 ratio most of the time (hence being able to fit 10GB onto a single layer DVD). I actually needed to make it bigger to include some custom applications, Eclipse, and some other development tools. Then I needed to make it bigger again when I needed to include a VM.

2008-05-29 08:54:39


Matt says...
Interesting. How does that affect the RAM footprint?

2008-05-29 11:40:21


slonkak says...
Live CDs have a super efficient memory manager, so it only loads things it needs and discards them when it's done. I just keep the RAM dedicated to the VM at 256MB and let the rest for the actual system. RAM is really only a problem if you want to run the Live CD from RAM, because it requires you have as much RAM as you have data on the disc.

2010-12-14 13:37:40


Brooke says...
Hi Shelden whats up im bored right now there is nothing to do!!!!!!! (:

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