Anyone successfully used USB thumb drive



  • Has anyone successfully set up a USB thumb drive to store packages? I followed the tutorial https://wiki.onion.io/Tutorials/Using-USB-Storage-as-Rootfs with pivot-overlay, but it looks like my USB drive isn't getting mounted automatically. Any ideas?



  • @Jeff-Verive Yes, I, and I believe several others, are using this regularly.
    A few things to check:

    • Are you using an ext4 partition on your USB drive?

    • Can you access the partition on the USB drive OK? Try the following to check (assuming the partition is partition1 on your USB drive):

      • cd /mnt
        mkdir sda1
        mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
        cd /mnt/sda1
        touch test-file
        ls - should show test-file
    • Is your /etc/config/fstab set up properly? Perhaps you could post a copy of it here so someone could take a look



  • Thanks for the reply, Kit. I repeated the process, and now the drive is getting mounted properly, showing about 14.7 GB (it's a 16GB drive) available in rootfs. I don't know why the process worked this time, but the only thing I did differently was to format the drive to ext4 instead of the previous FAT32. Nonetheless, it works - and I'm a happy camper again!



  • Cool - glad you've got it going šŸ™‚



  • I too have been trying the pivot-overlay approach to expand my root fiilesystem so that I may add new development tools.

    I am able to 'see', mount, and touch my ext4 formatted USB drive, but I am not able to edit my /etc/config/fstab file, since the partition is reported as 'read-only'. What am I missing? How can I get around this?



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