mass producing linux

[Void Main]

I really doubt the file system has anything to do with it. I would be more suspect of something with the pendrive and swap/etc overloading the USB channel or pen drive itself. I believe I have seen similar behavior on pen drives when doing very large data transfers. I don't know what it is though. What if you boot into single user mode from the hard drive with the root file system mounted RO? You would have to have your mount points already created (or use /mnt to mount your pen drive to copy to).

[byrdman]

just found out when you install from the LiveCD USB, it puts the ext4 on by default:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ext4_in_Fedora_11

[byrdman]

bummer...I did not see any swap mounted.
I am booting to a 1GB stick...what if I boot to a larger USB drive?
Can I mount swap with booting to pen drives?

is there another way to get the root filesystem onto a root.disk?

[Void Main]

You can just mount the swap partition on your hard drive but I'm not sure that is the problem. After you boot do this:

swapon /dev/sdxx (whatever your swap partition is).

As far as other ways to create the disk, sure there are several ways to do it. One way would be to shrink your partition down on the hard drive and make a 2nd partition to create your image on. Another way would be to pipe it to another machine over the network with tar (or just use rsync).

[byrdman]

how can I find the swap partition? its not in fstab...?

[Void Main]

Then maybe you didn't create one? "fdisk -l /dev/sda" should give you a list of the partitions and their types. You could also create a swap file instead of a partition somewhere on your hard drive. I definitely wouldn't put it on the USB drive.