Porteus

I spent many hours (okay, almost 2 days) setting up Porteus on a fat32 formatted USB.

I then read about the additional features available with a linux file system. So I formatted another USB to ext2, and copied that entire Porteus setup onto it.

However, I noticed some strange latency/sluggishness on ext2 (e.g. one example is that Thunar would take 20 seconds to open, versus 2 seconds on fat32). So I reformatted that USB to ext4 and copied the files again. But same problem. Then to determine if there was some sort of file corruption, I reformattted back to fat32 and recopied the files. Slowness issue was gone.

Could something about my approach (copying files from fat32 to ext2/4) be causing this issue? If so, is there any workaround without starting over?

Your best bet would be to boot using the copy2ram cheatcode so you have unfettered access to your USB stick.

1) Prepare your USB stick (format ext2/3/4).
2) Then you should mount the Porteus ISO and copy all files onto the USB stick
3) Create the folder /mnt/sdXy/porteus/changes <-- where Xy is your USB device
4) Now mount your existing save.dat file.
5) Copy all the files from the mounted save.dat file into the chnges folder.

Unmount the ISO and save.dat file and you should be good to go.

This avoids any files touching a FAT32 partition whereupon all file permissions are borked. This shouldn't cause any immediate problems so I would start looking at the USB device. Do you get the same sluggishness when you boot without any changes= cheatcode on a ext2/3/4 formatted device?

^ To make life easier you can try testing with this tool as well:

4. Tools for a new ISO test

Courtesy of neko.