Ultimate Boot CD

booting from USB stick is different from USB CDROM...I have a mobo that's a few years old and it supports booting from usb cdrom, automatically even if there's no other boot drive found.

USB flash drives have to be formatted in FAT16 like a floppy to be used as boot disks

go to hddguru.com and get the low level formatting tool...use it on the drive in question. I cleared and deleted the HPA from a drive and it locked me out...was at a loose end until i found the LLF tool...cleared the drive and gave me back all the space from he HPA:)