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The Startup Disk Creator no longer shows the option to create a persistent drive. How do I get back this setting in the application?

Rewarp
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2 Answers2

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Unfortunately it looks like in the source release notes changelog it was a decision to drop the Erase and Persistence widgets:

usb-creator (0.3.0) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ Marc Deslauriers ]
  * Rework the whole imaging process for writing to devices:
    - Use an equivalent of dd to make an exact copy of the image to the device
    - This also breaks persistence.

  [ Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre ]
  * Update UI and frontend code to drop the persistence widgets.
  * Drop Erase Disk widgets too.

 -- Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu-tl@ubuntu.com>  Fri, 11 Dec 2015 12:37:41 -0500

This can be found if you download the source for usb-creator-gtk.

Terrance
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    That's a shame. It's going to be less convenient trying to make a persistent setup now, since most of the GUI-based write-ups out there are based on Startup Disk Creator. – Rewarp May 14 '16 at 01:39
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    @Rewarp It is a shame! It does, however, look like persistence can still be achieved in unetbootin. – Terrance May 14 '16 at 01:46
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    I tried UNetbootin immediately, but it is surprisingly buggy for a mature software. I could not get it to detect the same USB drive which was already formatted with Startup Disk Creator. And looking at the bug reports, it seems upstream doesn't care to fix the bugs. – Rewarp May 14 '16 at 03:09
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    @Rewarp Yeah, I actually just tried that, and it didn't work. On a whim, I found one called mkusb that seemed to work. I created one with a persistence file, booted, installed Chrome, rebooted and it was still there. I found it here: http://askubuntu.com/a/753163/231142 – Terrance May 14 '16 at 03:50
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    What a shame this is! – Anwar Aug 25 '16 at 20:30
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    I treid UNetbootin and it created the a bootable USB stick, but its persistence option had no effect. – Flimm Sep 11 '16 at 08:51
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    Wow, what idiot came up with this decision? First they break usb-creator so that it fails when creating a USB drive. Then, they 'fix' it by making it silently create an unbootable USB drive rather than displaying an error. Then someone's decision is "HURR SCREW FIXING IT PROPERLY AND JUST WRITE THE ISO DIRECTLY TO THE DEVICE", thus making persistence and any unused space on the device unusable? – Hitechcomputergeek Oct 14 '16 at 18:56
  • They also seem to have broken the entire tool when they switched to using "the equivalent of dd." The usb block size gets corrupted for every usb drive I make and I need to recover it with some other tool (and without the persistent option I cant make a bootable drive with the drivers I need for my system -_-) – gnomed Feb 16 '17 at 04:09
  • @gnomed It's because the .iso they distribute is a hybrid ISO, which is basically a hack to allow the iso to have MBR, GPT, ISO9660, and I think Mac headers. Since it involves overlapping partitions, it confuses the hell out of tools such as fdisk and gdisk and, among other things, means that you can't easily repartition the disk. – Hitechcomputergeek May 12 '17 at 17:11
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I have had good luck using MultiSystem to create a bootable USB with persistence.You can find the iso at SourceForge and if you want to install it on a current system, here are the installation instructions from the MultiSystem website

Troy
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  • Last time I checked two months ago SourceForge is still bundled their own bits in downloadable packages, even though the new owners of SourceForge claim that they have stopped this unfortunate and disreputable practice. – karel Oct 06 '16 at 01:10