Reset, Recovery and partitions about crouton

[dnschneid]

Glad to hear you're finding it useful!

Recovering from a USB image will definitely wipe all partitions.

Toggling dev mode will wipe the stateful partition (H-STATE in the partition list), which as you can see in your screenshot, includes /home and /usr/local. Since the chroots are by default stored in /usr/local/chroots, they will indeed get wiped as well. I believe dev wiping only erases the stateful partition, so it shouldn't affect another "chroot" partition if you make one. It may be worth experimenting first just to be sure; it'll only take about 30 minutes and will give you some peace of mind, since it can be scary to think that your chroot could be wiped by hitting the wrong keys at boot-up :) If you do experiment, please post your results here.

Your existing partitioning is normal; there's a doc on what makes the partition list so crazy.

Note that you do NOT want to resize the stateful partition via a program in a chroot that's running out of that same stateful partition (again, as it is by default). Either run the chroot off of an SD card or USB stick, or run the repartitioning commands just using the commands available to non-chroot crosh.

[RFrascona]

So...I successfully created an ext4 partition and was able to load xfce using crouton. I was also able to launch using this command: sudo bash startfce4 -c /dev/sda7\ Drive/chroots. That being said, 2 things didn't go according to plan and that may have been due to my misunderstanding of the chroot environment. Even though I had loaded xfce via the new partition, I was unable to mount the partition that I was launched from. I was able to download a few packages, but I'm assuming they were going into the Chrome partition? So basically, the hope that I could save data here that was untouchable from chrome resets didn't work out. Further, the hope that the chroot would live on beyond a reset also failed. I'm not even sure it would have lasted a reboot. I attempted a factory reset via the button within chrome's help menu. Upon restart I got the developer mode warning, I bypassed but was forced to recover via USB drive. I tried to restart and toggle dev mode, but this still didn't matter and I was forced to go for full recovery. I guess it was worth a try.

[dnschneid]

The chroot doesn't have (easy) access to the Chromium OS partition other than through the Downloads folder as a convenience. All the work you do in the chroot (except for the ~/Downloads folder) will stay inside the chroot, so it shouldn't affect your main OS.
A factory reset is an entirely different beast from a dev wipe (it's confusing, I know), and may very well repartition your drive, clobbering the chroot partition. I'm not sure why you'd want the chroot (stored internally) to survive a factory reset, though...

[RFrascona]

Ok, for some reason I thought the only way to do a full recovery was to go through the recovery menu - ie. esc+F3+Power button. I thought the reset button in the help menu was equivalent to the dev wipe.

[dnschneid]

Unfortunately, they're all different. It's not obvious at all.