Thank you for the great suggestions. I made a slight change and everything went very well. I started with an empty 512MB stick saved Knoppix configuration and created persistant Knoppix image with 450MB space reserved. I then rebooted and copied over the knoppix.sh and configs.tbz files. Then I booted up without the sticks and THEN mounted both of them and mounted the knoppix.img file in each. Neither were active so no problems with open files etc. I ran the cp -a command noted and all went just fine. I did properties on each mounted img file system and both were slightly over 90MB. The new one actually had a few more bytes and 2 more subdirectories. I don't think anything got dropped. Old 90.3MB and new 90.5MB. There must be nearly 10MB in formatting overhead for ext2, wow costly overlay. 435.5 MB total, I asked for 450 for the image size so loss is up to 14.5MB now. At least I now have 339MB free now.