Booting from a USB stick

[Timothy Murphy]

Konstantin Svist wrote:

>> Finally, I found the USB stick was (perhaps not surprisingly)
>> mounted read-only, so one could not eg add a user;
>> or rather, one could, but it was not there on re-booting.

> Not that it helps, but...
> you should remember that Flash drives have a fairly limited number of
> write cycles - so keeping it read-only most of the time is probably best
> for you in the long run.

I've seen wildly varying estimates of the number of writes allowed.
I suspect the number has increased enormously with newer flash drives.
I just bought an 8GB flash drive from memoryC,
and there wasn't any warning of the life-time.

> But if you reallyl need it, you should be able to remount it as
> read/write with "mount -o remount,rw /"

Actually, I'm quite puzzled by this.
I did give this command.
Before I gave it, "mount" showed /dev/sdb1 as ro,
while after it was rw.
However, the changes I made (such as adding a user)
disappeared on re-booting (after running "sync").

If anyone can throw light on this I should be grateful.