Hi bugfree,
That's a tough one and I can very much relate to that frustration.
Therefore I have reduced the use of USB sticks as much as possible and prefer portable hard drives. I know, the physical size...
The way I have played around/ worked with it has been a bit different as I didn't utilize casper but set up sticks to boot into several iso files, either via grub2 or extlinux (=syslinux), both bootloader available, i.e. launching GRUB2 via extlinux if necessary. The worst was using FAT partitions, so I sometimes used ntfs and of course ext file systems.
Unfortunately I can't find the resource at the moment but I remember having read something about the different architecture of USB sticks that supposedly makes a huge difference for usages like ours.
At least trying to contribute something constructive to your issue:
1. Did you try booting the USB stick before resizing the FAT32 partition?
2. Have you tried to re-install sys/extlinux after resizing?
3. Maybe also worth trying: not resizing the FAT32 to minimum but leaving it a few MB bigger than necessary
4. Have you tried SDcards? Especially the microSDcards in an USB adapter offer an amazing size opposed to USB sticks. And maybe they don't have the flaws of the newer sticks? The ones I played with worked fine.
Hang in there, there is always a solution!
That's a tough one and I can very much relate to that frustration.
Therefore I have reduced the use of USB sticks as much as possible and prefer portable hard drives. I know, the physical size...
The way I have played around/ worked with it has been a bit different as I didn't utilize casper but set up sticks to boot into several iso files, either via grub2 or extlinux (=syslinux), both bootloader available, i.e. launching GRUB2 via extlinux if necessary. The worst was using FAT partitions, so I sometimes used ntfs and of course ext file systems.
Unfortunately I can't find the resource at the moment but I remember having read something about the different architecture of USB sticks that supposedly makes a huge difference for usages like ours.
At least trying to contribute something constructive to your issue:
1. Did you try booting the USB stick before resizing the FAT32 partition?
2. Have you tried to re-install sys/extlinux after resizing?
3. Maybe also worth trying: not resizing the FAT32 to minimum but leaving it a few MB bigger than necessary
4. Have you tried SDcards? Especially the microSDcards in an USB adapter offer an amazing size opposed to USB sticks. And maybe they don't have the flaws of the newer sticks? The ones I played with worked fine.
Hang in there, there is always a solution!