So this has been troubling me for a few days. I want to use Ubuntu from a live USB with persistence but I can ever get anything to actually persist when I boot up again. I have tried a combination of things. I have tried Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. I tried with Unetbootin and Universal USB Installer each time setting the persistence around 2GB. I wanted to use it for my Windows 8 laptop so I was using the 64bit version as Ubuntu suggested. I am able to boot from the USB and use Ubuntu fine. But when I reboot everything is gone. I tried setting up administrator account hoping everything would save to that. But I reboot it doesn't even recognize my account name or password. I then tried this on another laptop with Windows 7 and persistence still does not work. I do not know what I am doing wrong. Any idea of what could be the problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

have you tried installing ubuntu on usb stick, I mean running installer from another usb/cd and select usb key as it would be hard drive?

Thanks for your reply. And no I actually have not tried that yet. I heard that makes Ubuntu run very slow. I was going to try this as a last resort because I really just wanted it to be a live USB and I also do not have another USB on me. When I get to the store I will buy another USB and try it.

Is the cd or dvd still in the computer?

In most cases an application works quite well to create a pendrive sort of install. The option to add in a persistent file is also useful.

It seems that your install was somehow wrong. I can't guess as to what the issue could be. Things like bad startup config that doesn't properly include casper file (virtual file added to live cd files to make it persistent). Another idea may be that you didn't have enough room on flash drive. If you tell us the size we might guess. Maybe bad format. Could be a black market drive and it really doesn't have the amount of flash as sold. Could be odd filesystem.

See www.pendrivelinux.com for some good examples and maybe some other tools.

Did you start out the installer with Ubuntu's usb creator?

I didn't have a cd or dvd. My flash drive is a PNY 8GB and I used 4GB for the persistence. I thought too maybe it is juts not a good flash drive.

You should certainly be able to create a persistent live usb with Ubuntu. Unetbootin states on the window the persistence is for Ubuntu only although it does work with other systems. What filesystem type is on the flash? FAT32? You might check the ubuntu site to see if there are limits other than the 4GB for FAT. I used the Fedora liveusb-creator and their site says the maximum is 2047MB, not sure if Ubuntu has similar restrictions but I would try first making 2GB or less persistent if you haven't tried that already. If you want a larger file, you would have to use a Linux filesystem, ext2 or 3.

When you mount the flash in another Linux OS, do you see the casper-rw file? Check to see the size. Is it the size you set? Does the syslinux.cfg file on the flash show 'persistent' on the append line?

Yes I had FAT32 on the flash drive. I was setting the persistence to 2GB originally but I will try it again with maybe 1GB and see if that works. The casper-rw does say the same size and there is the word persistent on the syslinux.cfg. Very mind boggling. I will report back if the smaller persistence works.

Tried that with Linux Mint recently and it was veeery slow.

villmatic, if you are not fixed on using Ubuntu you may want to give Puppy Linux a try. I installed this on a pendrive, the persistence works like a charm and it's very snappy. I cannot tell any difference in performance to a normal hard drive install.