the picture you have taken from the "First shutdown: choose partition" to create a pupsave shows your sdb2/vfat with 9 M - 1M free! So no wonder - that is far too low for a savefile, resulting in the paradox -82KB size of the savefile in the "Final Sanity Check".
Follow the advice from @williwaw : <parted<print all> and post the output.
(If you use Gparted you should select sdb in the entry screen, then click OK and post the output of the following screen.)
Which leads to the question - how did you create the booting usb-stick? Looks like you dd'ed the iso or used a program which does it?