I believe the same issue I see with running "linux rescue" on a USB drive is the same issue I am having why the thumb drive wont boot. When installing I have to use expert mode I just cant install directly as the USB disk is not seen. What happens extra in expert mode? some delay somewhere??? When doing a linux rescue it looks for existing installations and finds none. This is because the USB disk is not yet ready. If I do "fdisk -l /dev/sda" from the shell given it is not there, wait a couple second do it again and NOW the fdisk -l /dev/sda shows the device... Its just like when you stick a USB disk in a working machine. takes a few second to be mount-able. So the big question is how do I get the USB disk to be recognized a FEW second later? The boot is happening tooo fast and I think and my USB disk is not yet ready. That is why it cant find my ext3 file system on the disk. I am so close to getting this thing running. Any suggestion/comments on what I am finding and how to get past it? Thanks guys. jerry