Porteus

I decided to run Porteus with persistence (aka porteus save file manager) yesterday, and Porteus has been acting weird ever since. The first 3-5 boots were okay, and then it stopped detecting the porteussave.dat. All my saved settings were gone and Porteus booted as if it was set to Always Fresh mode (though I selected Graphics Mode and there were no errors during boot).

I assumed there must have been a problem with the .dat file, so I resized it using Porteus Save File Manager, edited the .cfg file, rebooted, and everything was fine again. However, I faced a new problem that I didn't face earlier.

Porteus randomly closes all the running apps and returns to desktop. And when I try re-opening the apps, I get an Input/Output error. This has been happening a lot lately and I have to reboot every time, which is annoying. For instance:

This error comes when I try opening Thunar File Manager:

"Error when getting information for file '/home/guest': Input/Output Error"

This one comes when I try opening USM:

Failed to execute child process "/opt/porteus-scripts/xorg/psu" (Input/Output Error)

Some apps don't show an error at all. I keep clicking on them but they just won't start. How do I solve this? Does it have anything to do with the save file? Thanks!

Please generate a system information dump using the 'Porteus Settings Centre' if possible and upload it to pastebin. I would also help to get your savefila.dat uploaded somewhere so we can take a look at it. If none of these errors occur in fresh mode then it is most probably sue to one of your additions.

@jacobi59

Make a fsck on your USB; by the way, which file system are you using?

brokenman wrote:Please generate a system information dump using the 'Porteus Settings Centre' if possible and upload it to pastebin. I would also help to get your savefila.dat uploaded somewhere so we can take a look at it. If none of these errors occur in fresh mode then it is most probably sue to one of your additions.

Here are the links for the dump report and the savefile-recovery.log respectively:

http://pastebin.com/QPGd7eF3

http://pastebin.com/jWEHtgCX

I'm facing a new problem now. Porteus isn't detecting the savefile at all. I tried recovering it and resizing it, but nothing works. I'll let you know when I upload the .dat file itself. It's a large one so it may take a while.

wread wrote:@jacobi59

Make a fsck on your USB; by the way, which file system are you using?

The file system is vfat. I tried running fsck but it returns an "fsck command not found" error. I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing it right as this is the first time I'm running fsck.

your save.dat looks messed up. i think the only way is to replace it with a new one.
you may also try to mount it with 'mloop save.dat' command and recover important files (if any) manually from /mnt/loop.

do you know how the corruption happened? was there any power cut or kernel hang?

thanks.

I have no idea what caused this. Like I said, the first 3-5 boots were absolutely fine, and then it started acting weird.

Anyways, I recovered the necessary files and deleted the .dat file. Porteus seems really stable with Always Fresh mode on. I'm still trying to figure out what could have caused my save.dat to become corrupt.

@Jacoby59

With vfat you will always have problems. Start from the beginning making a decent fs on your USB, for instance ext4. Then copy your system and make it bootable. You can now start making your changes persistent without troubles.

Do as I say and you won't miss it 8)

Regards!

Maybe you have changed permissions and owner for home/guest (if you like copying:))? Login as root and see 'home/guest' owner.