This question is asked often in Ask Ubuntu, sometimes with few hints about the situation.

Please provide a list of possible reasons to help troubleshoot the problem.

Persistent live drive with a partition for persistence

There are some web sites describing

• new tools
• new features in [new versions of] old tools

that can create a persistent live drive from an iso file with Ubuntu 19.10 and the corresponding Ubuntu family flavours.

• Why and how does it work?
• How is it different from earlier methods for persistent live drives?
• Isn't live the default for a cloned drive?

I've got an mkusb live USB (Ubuntu 18.04 with persistence) that boots fine on some of my computers. On one laptop I get the following error:

error: disk `hd0,4' not found.
error: you need to load the kernel first.

What do I need to do to, "load the kernel first"?

EDIT: An SD card occupying an SD slot was causing this issue. Removing the SD card allows mkusb to boot properly, and eliminates the error. Once booted I reinsert the SD card into the SD slot if I need to use it.

After many unsuccessful trials based on almost everything about this topic on the Internet, I decided to ask this question again. There is almost a perfect answer in this platform, but it did not work. That's why I am here.

I want to have Ubuntu 18.04 installed on my USB memory stick (SanDisk Cruzer Glide 32GB) with a persistent storage of more than 4GB (at least 23GB in my case).

I used MiniTool partition wizard to format the stick (NTFS) on Windows. Then, I used Universal USB Installer 1.9.8.2 to install Ubuntu 18.04 on the stick. Here, I tried to format the stick either fat32 or ntfs, but nothing changed. Later, I used another Ubuntu to delete the casper-rw file and create another partition with the same name by following the steps given in the link given above. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it working although I tried almost all combinations.

Can anyone give a thorough list of steps to follow in order to install it on the stick properly?

Edit: I gave ear to @c-s-cameron 's comment below and used YUMI to do that, and it worked. I believe all other answers would work, but I dont have time to give a try for all of them. Thanks all, again!

I want to install Ubuntu to a USB hard drive so that it will run on all systems, that can run the LiveCD and store persistent data on a regular ext4 partition rather than a casper-rw file. In every other way it should behave like a regular Ubuntu installation.

The problem

With Startup Disk Creator one is able to put the LiveCD image on a USB-device. Changes can be made persistent but are stored in a file that is limited to a few GB in size. Said persistent file (additionally to being size restricted) has the problem that it isn't readable like data on a normal partition.*

My question

So how do I get the LiveCD on a USB disk in such a way that the changes are stored in a normal partition rather than a persistence file? Also the persistent changes shouldn't be restricted to a few GB in size but use whole partition of many 100 GB if need be.

I suspect there is a tutorial out there for this, but my google-fu is just not good enough to find it.

tl;dr:

Sytem should run on all hardware configurations, have full functionality of the LiveCD and be stored on a regular ext4 partiton without using ramdisks and casper-rw. FU casper-rw.

*I know one could mount the casper-rw file from another OS and get to the data this way but that's a hassle.