I'm trying to make a bootable USB drive (it's a bigun' @ 64gb) for Linux Mint 19.0 with either LILI or Unetbootin and adding a large number for persistence, but that part never seems to work. It boots just fine, everything works, I can make all sorts of changes, and then on a reboot, it's back to square one. This is on either a Windows 7 professional (LILI) or on a Linux 18.3 laptop (Unetbootin). Any idea why the persistence part never works? These are recent releases (newly downloaded versions of each).

I haven't used LILI but have never had a problem with persistence using unetbootin, especially with an Ubuntu derivative like Mint. Are you creating a persistent file or a persistent partition (labelled casper-rw). What filesystem on the flash drive? With a Linux filesystem you should be able to make a persistent partition of any size you want. With a usb that size, why not just install a full system?

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I used Mint to format the drive as requested, FAT 32. No, I did not use Gparted to set up any partitions as Unetbootin never even suggested that or how the partition was to be labeled or formatted. It simply asked how large the persistence should be and I entered a number, something like 8000. The USB that size? It's what I had handy. We are getting to the install. My mother is 98 and was getting frustrated with Windows 10 and all of it's error messages. Mint with the Cinnamon desktop is a lot easier to use than Windows. She mostly uses it for e-mail. banking, and shopping on the internet. The SSD in her laptop isn't large enough to let Windows to an upgrade and I thought Linux Mint with a Cinnamon desktop would cause her less grief. This problem has bugged me for a few years as I try to make one that has a working persistence and keep failing at it. I can use Gparted, and have, but don't know where this partition is supposed to be, is it done before or after you run Unetbootin, what is it labeled and formatted to what since Unetbootin asked for a FAT32 drive. It would have been nice if they had mentioned that somewhere.

8000MB of persistence will not work on FAT partition of your drive. casper-rw (persistence file) cannot be lager then 4Gb, and it's FAT limitation. I use live usb on regular basis, on me flashdrive there are 2 partitions - fat and ext4. peristence file is 3Gb and it's enough for saving settins and some small data. for the rest of data, I use ext4 partition, which is 32Gb.

You might be able to use unetbootin on a Linux filesystem but they do say if you have problems to use FAT32. Have you tried a Linux filesystem?. If you do use FAT32, you can't have a persistence of more than 4GB as pointed out above so if you entered 8000 (8GB), it will not work. That's the filesystem not unetbootin. If you have an installation of Mint on another computer, you should be able to download and use software called mkusb which I think works better than other software I've used. Check the Mint Software Center/Manager to see if it is in their repositories. Very simply to use.

Again, if you have a 64GB flash drive, why not do a full install?

First, the 64GB flash drive was what I had handy.
I tried a Persistence size of 2890 (pull the number outa my butt) and that didn't work either. I used to be able to do this, but something changed.

As a side bar, the computer trying this was running Windows 10. It's an HP laptop with only 32GB of eMMC storage. The free space got down to 1.3GB. After I installed Linux Mint 19 with the Cinnamon desktop, it had 20GB free. Ya gotta love Windows.