I would like to access the data on my persistent Ubuntu flash drive, but....
 

I would like to access the data on my persistent Ubuntu flash drive, but I think I understand why I cannot find a way to do this. I am using Ubuntu 12.10 on a flash drive that is persistent. In order to view data on my laptop's ACTUAL hard drive, while Ubuntu is booted from the flash drive, I have to remove the persistent file (casper-rw) from the flash drive's root. Once placed back in the root of the flash drive I cannot view anything from my ACTUAL hard drive, but that's another story. My current problem is that I cannot find the Ubuntu "hard drive" unless the casper-rw file is in the flash drive's root; however, I cannot open the Ubuntu "hard drive" to view its contents either.

{Breaking it down:

CASPER-RW FILE PRESENT IN THE FLASH DRIVE'S ROOT

I CAN FIND my persistent flash drive's "hard drive" when the casper-rw file is present, but I CANNOT OPEN it to view its contents.

I CANNOT view the contents of my laptop's actual hard drive when the casper-rw file is present.

CASPER-RW FILE MISSING FROM THE FLASH DRIVE'S ROOT

I CAN view the contents of my laptop's actual hard drive when the casper-rw file is missing, but I CANNOT FIND my persistent flash drive's "hard drive."

I wanted to know if this is directly a result of the casper-rw file essentially BEING the "hard drive" of the Ubuntu OS? It would mean that I'm basically booting a live disk without storage if I boot Ubuntu from the flash drive with the casper-rw file out of the flash drive's root right? Since the casper-rw file is not in the root anymore? My line of thinking was that the flash drive is now a copy of the live disk. Since you cannot save changes to a disk, I've made the assumption that I cannot find the "hard drive's" location because I wouldn't be able to if I were trying to from the live disk itself. Am I thinking along the correct lines here or no?

Hi,

you must mount the drive some place,

when you type,

cat /etc/mtab

does it show the HDD?

if not you need to set a mount point (even temporary, "folder must exist" on older systems)

and mount it. You need to know its address (sda1, hda1)and filesystem type (vfat, ext3)

I sometimes do this,
usually works.

Next prob will be permissions to view and or write to files.
see, man chmod, man chown
I don't know about changing the root device (chroot).

Regards Glenn

I can click the hard drive from the list on the left of the Home Folder. When I do this it says the device cannot be mounted. I am COMPLETELY new to Ubuntu, actually Linux in general, and have no idea if the sentences before this one have any relation to what your last reply was about.

Boot to a live cd and see if you can view internal hard drive. It normally would be available to be mounted either in read only or even read write ntfs-3G. If so then we can guess the flash drive install or more is borked.

In any normal flash drive cheated install such as you made with some program, one can access the internal hard drive.

I can't even guess what you have or how you created it. There are basically three or four ways to make a bootable usb drive. In your process I suspect that you somehow have an issue with either a loader, or extra casper or some bios issue with naming.

I have a Toshiba flash drive, I used Linux Live usb creator, and I mounted the iso of Ubuntu 12.10 from a disk drive that my laptop doesn't physically have, I forget what that is called at this specific moment. This disk drive was created by daemon tools, daemon tools is also how I mounted Ubuntu 12.10. Oh! And I have no way, that I know of, to but this version of Ubuntu from a cd because I don't have any blank disks... maybe I could mount this iso to a disk drive for a virtual box thing... I can't remember the names of things right now. I'll post again later with my idea.

Linux live usb creator is a Mac/Win application. You should not have had to do more than have access to an iso. That access didn't have to be local file but I can't tell why you needed any other tools to create it. The creator should have done all it needed to the fat32 formatted flash drive.

Could you have created a few partitions on the flash drive?

In the mean time, be sure to see www.pendrivelinux.com for some helpful info.

As to how to fix it?? Personally I don't use the installs at pendrivelinux anymore. I do use a virtual machine to create usb drives for distro's that use the usb as a hard drive. That is almost all newer distro's.