Comment 80 for bug 84591

Vincent,

When booted into the system from which you are issuing the "syslinux" command to create your persistent drive, make sure you are using the gutsy versions of syslinux and mtools (mtools may not have changed from edgy and feisty). That fixed the problem for me completely. If that system isn't gutsy, and you don't want to upgrade the entire system to gutsy, you can still upgrade only those two packages by changing your sources.list temporarily to gutsy, and then issuing sudo apt-get update, and then sudo aptitude install syslinux, for example.

So, all I did was boot up on a drive other than the one I wanted to make persistent. I took a usb drive on which I had been using the patched feisty system (so prepared exactly in accordance with your tutorial). I then deleted everything from the partition containing the cd-rom files except for syslinux.cfg (i.e. I am using exactly the same syslinux file as for the patched feisty system). I then copied all of the gutsy beta files onto that partition, except for the isoconfig (or whatever the syslinux.cfg file was called before we renamed it to syslinux.cfg). I also deleted everything off of the casper-rw partition other than the lost and found directory (and my home directory). I then issued the syslinux command (again with the gutsy version of syslinux installed), and I am good to go.

Note, if this works for you, I did experience a large number of freeze ups with firefox, which I believe is a reported firefox issue. I currently have the "fasterfox" add-on installed because some people said that fixed the problem for them. So far I haven't re-experienced the firefox freezes, but I need more time to assess whether or not that really fixed the issue.

I also downgraded to the edgy versions of the 3 upstart files as I described above. That fixes a failure to unmount local filesystems that I have been experiencing since the feisty upstart upgrades. You will probably run fine if you don't do that downgrade, but if you receive the failure to unmount local filesystems error on shutdown, you probably will need to do that downgrade to avoid causing errors on your persistent drive.