I want to thank everyone who responded.  I found the problem.  Evidently, when I created the thumb-drive I overlooked the setting for file persistence.  I know better than that but when I recreated the drive everything worked as expected, so that must have been the trouble all along.

Anyway, I sure appreciate this group and the different things I read about here.

Thanks,
David

kd7uch@arrl.net

On Jul 29, 2013 6:46 PM, "David Evans" <kd7uch@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello, all;

Recently I have been using a bootable CD of CHIRP to take with me to radio club (Voice of Idaho) activities to help newbies program their radios.  Works great, but I thought that a thumb drive would be handier since I could store some data files on it.  Now, I have a fair familiarity with Linux but this stumps me.  I created the boot-able thumb-drive and copied the CHIRP data files to the documents folder on it.  They went on with no error messages and opened in CHIRP.  Everything seemed fine until I rebooted the system and found that those data files were gone.

So, I am wondering why they were gone and what can I do to fix this. 

--
Thanks,
David
kd7uch@arrl.net