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Creating a persistent file. Progress will not move until finished...

It's been at it for 3-4 hours. I selected to install Ubuntu on a near empty drive (With just the image file of the OS installer in it.

I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or if something went wrong on the other end, or both (or is this supposed to be normal?)

I'm a Windows refugee. System specs are 16GB RAM, i7-7700K (2.80GHz), GTX 1050 Ti.

Zanna
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Bonita
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2 Answers2

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Universal USB Installer and a casper-rw file

The OP, @Bonita, was able to solve the problem after we had exchanged ideas via comments. I write this answer to explain the solution.

The Universal USB Installer creates a casper-rw file for persistence, and she had selected all remaining space for it, which made it huge, because it was in a hard disk drive. The method to create the casper-rw file is intended for rather small USB pendrives, and it will take a very long time for a huge file.

She solved the problem by creating a smaller casper-rw file, only a few Gigabyte.

Universal USB asked me (optional) to define the persistent data size and I accidentally had the whole space drive (of the HDD) defined for it, rather than a small number like 2GB. Maybe that's why it was taking forever? edit: I retried the install. This time it wrapped up under 10 seconds! That must have been it.

mkusb and a casper-rw partition

If you have a big USB drive, like in this case a hard disk drive, or an SSD, and you want to use all the remaining drive space for persistence, you can use a persistent live system with a casper-rw partition.

mkusb can create such a persistent live system, and setting up a big or huge partition is much faster than doing it for a file of the same size.

General discussion

See also this link, and the discussion in the whole thread (the question and also the other answers),

... try out new OS releases without committing to it? - USB alternatives

sudodus
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As an aside - in windows 10 the casper-rw file is created in your Users\"user name"\AppData\Local\Temp folder before being deleted at the end of the process. If (as I have just done) you have a larger USB drive (128GB) and you set the persistent file size too big you may find yourself running out of space on your OS drive (in my case a 258GB NVME). This will slow/stop the process and can cause a significant problems in win 10 and if you are forced to abort the process you will need to find the file and delete it to get your space back.

fadingfool
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