Ok this is the 2nd time this has happened to me. I have gotten up to chapter 5 and finished installing GCC using the LiveCD and VirtualBox, but when I shut down VirtualBox and start it up the next day with the LiveCD, all my work is gone. No LFS user, no /mnt/lfs directory, no sources, NADA. Everything is just gone.

How the heck do I save my work? This is the 3rd time I've had to start over and it takes longer to get back to where I was each time because I have to do everything over again. Do I really need to snapshot the system each time I want to shut down and then start in the snapshot?

Seems kinda stupid, and I don't know how I would do that if I wasn't using VBox so I must be missing something...what do I need to do to make sure my work is saved when I shut down? Am I shutting down uncleanly or something?

Thanks!

EDIT: BTW this is on a host of WinXP pro 32 bit.

Hi,

Not sure, maybe a stupid question, but which drive do you mount when working with the LiveCD? When you run from the LiveCD everything happens in 'volatile' memory, that is, when you shutdown, it's lost, permanently.

In order to avoid that you'll have to mount your virtual harddrive to a directory as read-write. Could you post what you normally do when your LiveCD session is booted? I assume you don't mount a disk correctly so everything you do just 'evaporates' when you stop.

Kind regards,

Eric

I've simply followed the instructions in the book so far. Upon further investigation, I ran fdisk -l and see that my partitions are still there...so I mounted hda1 to /mnt/lfs and swapon'd hda2. Once that happened, most of the work is back, but I am still missing the lfs user. Checking through the file system, I can see that $LFS/sources, $LFS/tools are both there and the folders within them i.e. GCC and binutils which I've compiled so far are still compiled and ready to go.

Does that answer your question or do I need to provide more info?

Thanks!

EDIT: I am just going to start over again to verify everything's done correctly but I would still like an answer so this doesn't happen in the future

Hi,

So if I understand you correctly, mounting the partitions got your work back, right? Great! That's the first step you'll have to remember when working from the LiveCD, you'll always first have create the directories to mount everything to, in order to get access to 'where you left off'. It's normal that the lfs user is missing in action, that user too only exists for the duration of the session. So, you'll have to repeat creating the user every new session.

Remember, when running from a LiveCD, everything is volatile, except for what you write to a mounted disk.

You could also install a system to the VirtualBox with all the packages you need (see the prerequisites). This way you avoid having to repeat the same things over and over again.

Kind regards,

Eric

It will happen over and over again as long as you run from a LiveCD.

Kind regards,

Eric

thanks for the advice. I've started over because I'm not too far in this time. I'll remember this for the future though. The good news is I didn't even need the LFS book to get up to ch. 5 this time lol

Great, glad you got it up and running. What an advantage not having to start from 'scratch' again, right?

Kind regards,

Eric