Persistence on Tinycore 12.0 virtual machine

Using Oracle Virtual Box, I have a Tinycore 12.0 virtual machine with a MacOS Big Sur 11.2.3 host. I have the most minimal Core version, no GUI, because I was having trouble with mouse tracking and I would only really use the machine for the command line. The issue I'm having is that I can't get things to "stick" through reboots. When I first booted, nothing stuck, so I looked around and used tce-ab to install tc-install. I then used tc-install.sh to install on the virtual disk I had created in virtualbox (32 GB). I selected ext4 for the install. I also used the boot options opt=sda1 home=sda1 tce=sda1. I installed vim to test, and it stuck through reboots. At this point, I tried adding a file to the home directory. After touch test and sudo reboot, test was gone. My /mnt/sda1/tce/boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf file looks like this:

DEFAULT corepure64
LABEL corepure64
KERNEL /tce/boot/vmlinuz64
INITRD /tce/boot/corepure64.gz
APPEND quiet user=myname opt=sda1 home=sda1 tce=sda1 norestore

The norestore comes from https://www.linuxsecrets.com/tinycorelinux-wiki/wiki:backup_hd.html The boot options I used come from https://www.linuxsecrets.com/tinycorelinux-wiki/wiki:install_hd.html I have absolutely no attachment to any data on this system, and I'm at a complete loss at what to do. Edit: On boot, there is an space to specify options manually. If I do this and type mc home=sda1, then the home directory persists.