Making a live USB with persistent storage

Solution 1:

I have an IBM T-42 Thinkpad too, and Lubuntu 32-bit works with the boot option forcepae.

I suggest that you install mkusb according to the following links,

help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb

help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb/persistent

Then, with mkusb installed, you can create a persistent live drive with all current versions of Ubuntu (also 64-bit versions for newer computers).

See also the following links for more details,

how-do-i-make-a-persistent-live-usb-of-ubuntu-16-04

unable-to-boot-ubuntu-live-usb-flash-drive-with-casper-rw-persistent-partition

Edit: After a debugging dialogue, a bug was found and squashed. The problem was some confusing data due to a floppy drive (a bug that only affects very old computers).

A new version can be installed via the following commands

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mkusb/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The current update (2017-04-03) installs mkusb version 12.0.9