My advice for anyone wanting live boot or with persistence is that 1) you can burn the iso on USB via universal USB with windows if you want to go that route.. but to make the partition for persistence you need to be in Linux using gparted.. spent the better part of a day the other day trying multiple things as various attempts none worked until I came across a post where someone mentioned that.. tried it and boom it worked.. so use two USB with kali and load the one you want with persistence in gparted make the partition with format ext4 ... apply the partition .. and reboot in persistence with the newly partitioned USB and make the commands mkdir -p /mnt/kali etc ...
Mount /dev/sdba /mnt/kali
Echo ?/ union? > /mnt/kali/persistence.conf
umount /dev/sdba

Reboot make a test folder in desktop .. note when u umount the persistence drive should disappear if not hit the command again and reboot it should not be there any more.. make a test file or folder on desktop reboot and check if it?s there still or not..

Anyone has questions feel free to shoot me a pm ... I?m no pro but I went through quite a bit of trials and errors myself this week I?m confident to help out as needed if needed.

-DigitlRFYUG