How to Create a Live Ubuntu USB Drive With Persistent Storage on Linux System

On windows system you can use rufus to create peristance bootable OS. Rufus

For Ubuntu and linux OS You need to install mkusb tool first. mkusb download link

You need to install mkusb. Mkusb will create two partitions casper-rw with ext filesystem and usbdata partition, which has the NTFS file system

casper-rw is used to store persistance data

Press the Super (Windows) key and type “mkusb”. The mkusb icon will appear. Click the icon or press Enter.

A dialog will ask you whether you wish to run the dus (Do USB Stuff) version of mkusb. Click the “Yes” button.

A terminal window with a black background will appear and a dialog box will prompt you for your password. Enter your password and click the “OK” button.

Warning: This process will wipe the contents of the USB drive!

Click “OK” in the warning dialog to acknowledge you understand this.

Click the “Install (make a boot device)” entry in the list and click the “OK” button.

Select the “‘Persistent live’ – only Debian and Ubuntu” entry in the list and click the “OK” button.

A file browser dialog will appear. Browse to the Ubuntu ISO file you downloaded, select it, and click the green “OK” button.

In the screenshot below, we’re selecting the Ubuntu 19.04 ISO image from the Downloads folder.

You’ll see a list of the USB drives connected to your computer. This allows you to select the appropriate USB drive.

There was only one USB drive connected to the test machine used for this article. As we confirmed above, it is called sdb. We’ve confirmed that’s the USB drive we want to use so we can proceed with confidence. Click the “OK” button.

When the dialog shown below appears, select the “usb-pack-efi (default grub from ISO file)” entry in the list and click the “OK” button.

You have one more option to choose. You can select what percentage of the storage space is for persistent storage in the casper-rw partition. The remainder will be used for the usbdata partition, which has the NTFS file system and can also be accessed from Windows PCs and Macs.

If you’re happy to have the available space on the USB drive shared equally between these two partitions, leave the slider at its default value and click the “OK” button.

Now, we just have to tell mkusb that we’re happy with all of our choices and that it should proceed.

To be clear, this is the last point at which you can back out. If you’re certain you wish to proceed, select the “Go” radio button and click the “Go” button.

A progress bar shows you how close the creation process is to completion.

The final stage of the creation is to flush the file system buffers to the USB drive. You are also advised to wait until you see the phrase “Work done”. That will indicate the process has completed.

When the process has completed you will see a dialog with the phrase “Work done” highlighted in green. Click the “OK” button. If any other dialogs appear, close them by clicking on the “Quit” button.

A few more lines of output will scroll through the terminal window. You will be prompted to press “Enter” when you are ready.

When you press “Enter,” the terminal window will close. You can now either reboot your computer and boot from the USB drive or unplug the USB drive, take it to another computer, and boot it there.