I used the instructions at “Live USB stick”](http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick) as a starting point to create a bootable USB flash drive (FOB). I downloaded “Live GNOME”](http://software.opensuse.org/112/en) to my hard drive. I have in the past used KDE, but I’ve been gradually leaning more and more towards GNOME, so I’m on a GNOME learning curve 
It took me a while to figure out how to remove the software on the Sandisk FOB. U3_tools did the job. Yeh!
I copied Live GNOME over to the FOB via dd. This became the first partition on the FOB. Here’s where it got kind of fuzzy. I wasn’t sure how I should partition the rest of the FOB. How would the partitions be used by Live GNOME and how did they get mounted?
After some trial-and-error, I decided to create 2 additional partitions on the FOB. I created a small 2nd partition that I believe is used by Live GNOME to save changes. It is automatically mounted by Live GNOME and is inaccessible even by root due to GVFS. Whatever space was left went to the 3rd partition, which I formatted a ext3 FS and manually mounted. This would be for user data.
I did have some weirdness once. It it seemed like the 2nd partition got scragged. The boot hung and the messages indicated bad superblock and couldn’t mount. But I’m not sure of the events that led up to it. I just repartitioned the FOB. I also got a parsing error on the boot option, ipv6.disable=1. Live GNOME doesn’t seem to like it.
Did I get this right with the 3 partitions? What’s up with that 2nd partition that Live GNOME mounts and uses?
Thank you.