Thanks to all who replied. You guy's were all right on as the problem was that my 4GB didn't have enough memory left for the persistent file , it showed only 90MB available. I switched to a larger 16GB that I have and everything works as advertised and we now have persitance. The only problem left now is that my computer won't boot off of the large 16GB flash drive so I get around that by booting with the DVD and at the first KNOPPIX screen boot prompt I do a, knoppix fromhd=/dev/sdb1 and then it loads from the flash drive OK. webtek