Persistence not working: I must be doing something really gimp

[PingPing]

I've tried for the past 3 hours to get persistence working.  It's really beginning to p*** me off.
I'm using a USB stick install of TCL.
I've setup a FAT32 partition on the USB stick and have 'run' syslinux on it to make it bootable.
I've got the bzImage and tinycore.gz images on the stick as well and I can boot into TCL from the USB stick without any problems.
The stick shows up as /dev/sdb1.
However, I can't - for the life of me - get the PPR/persistence working.
I've tried to boot tinycore tce=sdb1 like the 'Core Concepts' said.  It boots okay but there's no record anywhere of the packages I installed from the last session.
I've tried manually adding a 'tce' directory to the root directory of the USB stick and then repeating the above.  It didn't work either.
I've tried what seems like zillions of other combinations but I can't see to get the damn thing to work.
I see from the forums that other people apparently have had no problem with this.
I would REALLY appreciate an explanation (line by line if possible - maybe add it to the FAQ?) of how to do this as, so far, my experience of TCL has been somewhat frustrating. 
Kind regards

[Juanito]

If you create two folders:

/mnt/sdb1/tce
/mnt/sdb1/tce/optional

and copy extensions into one or the other folders, the extensions in /tce should be loaded automatically at boot and the extensions in /tce/optional should appear in the app browser "optional" dialogue.

Since fat partitions cannot work with linux file permissions, I'm wondering if this might be the cause of your problems, but I don't think so. Did you copy any extensions into /mnt/sdb1/tce after you created it?

[PingPing]

Did you copy any extensions into /mnt/sdb1/tce after you created it?

No, I didn't do that.  I seem to have fixed it though.  I've just read elsewhere on the forums that passing the 'waitusb=5' kernel parameter fixes slow USB drives.  That seems to have fixed it and persistence is now working.

Thanks for the tip about manual creation of 'optional' and also for manual copying of .tcz and .tce files into /tce.  I'll keep this in mind the next time I'm having problems. 

I'm using FAT32 because I may want to copy/paste stuff to a windows install.  I would prefer NTFS but I'm not sure what bootloader to put on an NTFS partition.

I re-iterate my previous point: there should be an FAQ/Core Concepts reference to the 'waitusb=5' kernel parameter for those of us that don't want to waste GBP2 on burning 10MB to a 700MB CD. 

[Juanito]

I'm using FAT32 because I may want to copy/paste stuff to a windows install.  I would prefer NTFS but I'm not sure what bootloader to put on an NTFS partition.

You can get freeware ext2 drivers for windows that work fine in w2k/vista (I never tried in xp), which allow you to freely share data between linux and windows - this is what I use with tinycore booting from an ext2 partition on a usb stick.

...for those of us that don't want to waste GBP2 on burning 10MB to a 700MB CD. 

It's 2 quid for a blank cd now? 

[curaga]

indeed, perhaps when bought separately :p
In spindles of 50 or 100 it's still less than 0.30 euros per disc.