Mark Filipak wrote:
GRUB & LILO install failures unexplained - no help.
Well that makes perfect sense. GRUB and LILO boot loaders designed to work with a hard drive. You (probably) need to install a different boot loader on a USB stick - and which one is dependent on what your BIOS supports (and, of course, you have to set your BIOS appropriately).
Booting from a CD/DVD follows a different process - using isolinux as the boot loader.
Booting from a USB stick follows yet another process, and which process is somewhat dependent on what your BIOS supports. I'm a little fggy on the details (haven't done it it a while), but some BIOSs know how to boot from a USB stick, others have a mode called USBHDD, where they treat the USB stick as if it's a hard drive - which means you have to play some games in the USB setup to make it look like a hard drive, with an MBR and all. As I recall, syslinux is one way to boot from a USB stick.
See http://wiki.debian.org/BootProcess for more details.
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en for installing on a USB stick
(when in doubt, FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS)
Try doing a basic installation from http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/installmanual before you start trying more complicated things.