Greetings to everyone,
After having gotten Obarun booting up on a Virtual Machine and working well, I have decided it is time to move on and try the system on my machine.
I want to set up a bootable Obarun flash drive with one partition for the OS and the second partition for persistence.
So far, I have not been able to get Obarun to boot unless I dedicate the entire flash drive to the OS. I have tried burning the ISO with Unetbootin, directly with dd, loop mounting the ISO and copying files to the flash drive partition and trying to install GRUB there. So far none of those have worked. I am hoping someone here has experience with this and could give me some pointers on how to accomplish this.

Any help greatly appreciated.
Yes, I did see that but once I burn the ISO to my flashdrive I am unable to create a new partition. The ISO gets burned as an iso9660 file system which takes up all the space available on the drive and (at least with gparted as root) I can not resize or change the partition to make room for another.
I need to figure out how to burn the ISO to flashdrive while leaving some space free to have a second partition. That is the crux of the issue.
you need to create two partitions on your flashdrive with e.g. gparted, one for the ISO and one for the persistant. Then burn the ISO on the first partition and follow the instructions of the thread to be able to use the second partition as a persistent one.
Thanks for your help thus far. I appreciate your patience with helping out.
I have been able to make the two partitions on the flash drive I want to use...I guess I should have explained that better in the first post. That part is easy enough to accomplish.

However, the problem comes when trying to burn the ISO to one of the partitions while leaving the second partition intact.
As noted in the first post I made on this topic, I have tried a few different ways to burn the ISO:
-Using dd results in the two partitions being erased and the ISO burned to the entire flashdrive. (Same result with Etcher)
-Using Unetbootin, I can get the ISO to burn to the partition but booting fails.
-Loop mounting the ISO and copying the files onto the flashdrive partition is successful but I can not boot that nor can I get GRUB or SYSLINUX to install onto the flashdrive properly to allow a successful boot.

Nowhere in the link you provided above do they talk about how to burn the ISO to a partition and not to the whole flashdrive. This is why I'm stuck...
FWIW, I am using an older machine that does not support EFI boot.
i need to remake a test to see the process again.
No problem and absolutely no rush.
I've installed the system onto a second flashdrive using obarun-install from a live USB. It's not exactly how I wanted to setup but it works for the purpose of testing things out on my machine. FWIW, I have a feeling the Unetbootin or loop mount/copy would work if I could figure out how to properly install GRUB afterwards. The way I've usually done that doesn't seem to work for some reason but I can't figure out why.
Creates a gpt table partition
makes 2 partition e.g /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdc2.
Format the /dev/sdc2 partition 
mkfs.ext4 -L aufs-rw /dev/sdc2
burn the ISO into the first partition 
# sudo dd bs=4M if=obarun-2022.03.12-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdc1 status=progress oflag=sync
Mount the second partition as cow_device at boot time.
doesn't work at all :/
Yea, I tried it but could not boot the drive with my old BIOS only boot machine. No options in BIOS for anything other than legacy boot.
I still think copying the ISO contents onto a partition would work. The question is how to install GRUB onto the flashdrive so that it will boot up. I am no GRUB expert but I think one must have vmlinuz and initrd.img (which does not seem to be present) for GRUB to be able to work properly.

Unfortunately, I totally borked the fully installed version I had put on another flashdrive so I have to start over. I have a new-to-me machine coming in a couple of weeks that I am planning to install Obarun onto. Hopefully, I can get all the bugs worked out prior to taking it as my full-on daily driver.

If you have the inclination to continue investigating this I will certainly try testing whatever ideas you may have.

Thanks again.

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