i've been successful at installing the bt4 pre-final on 2 different thumbdrives, AND my hd

but at the grub menu, if i select Start Persistent Live CD for persistence, i get a initramfs prompt

the other selections work just fine, everything loads and i can type startx and kde loads

but no persistence, and i need to get the persistence working

i've installed bt4 per-final using unetbootin, and i got that stupid initramfs prompt for some stupid little shell before everything loads

i installed step by step from the video tutorial using the grub-install, exactly as the video showed, and still when i select Start Persistent Live CD i get that dumb prompt

ANY of the other menu choices, that arent persistent, load just fine

i've spent 9 hours trying to get this to work, does anyone have any other ideas?
thanks in advance