For the records, I tried shrinking down the existing DAT file with the same Ventoy script following the instructions (setting negative size).
During the shrink, I encountered some errors saying "wrong blocks number, Fix? [Y/n]" or something like that. I selected Y, and the operation succeeded. However, I then tried to boot Ventoy with that persistence file but Cinnamon kept crashing exactly like before.
Then, I made a new caspar-rw DAT file from scratch, using the CreatePersistentImg.sh script provided by Ventoy, with the size I wanted. This worked correctly (no crashes anymore).
Again, I'm highlighting that I used the same USB/hardware in this whole process.
This proves that the DAT file that I tried to extend was corrupted after extension.
I think the issue was that when I extended the first DAT file, I did it by extending it directly on the external USB drive. I think there may have been some write errors during that -- what makes me think so is the following warning in the Ventoy documentation:
although this applies to the creation of a Dat file, it may well apply to the extension too. My USB stick could have been slow and perhaps writing happened incorrectly.
During the shrink, I encountered some errors saying "wrong blocks number, Fix? [Y/n]" or something like that. I selected Y, and the operation succeeded. However, I then tried to boot Ventoy with that persistence file but Cinnamon kept crashing exactly like before.
Then, I made a new caspar-rw DAT file from scratch, using the CreatePersistentImg.sh script provided by Ventoy, with the size I wanted. This worked correctly (no crashes anymore).
Again, I'm highlighting that I used the same USB/hardware in this whole process.
This proves that the DAT file that I tried to extend was corrupted after extension.
I think the issue was that when I extended the first DAT file, I did it by extending it directly on the external USB drive. I think there may have been some write errors during that -- what makes me think so is the following warning in the Ventoy documentation:
- When creating the image file and copy to USB, take care about the buffer. (use sync to flush the data to the disk)
although this applies to the creation of a Dat file, it may well apply to the extension too. My USB stick could have been slow and perhaps writing happened incorrectly.