I decided to try a boot-able live linux install on on an 8Gb usb flash drive. I wanted something that would run on a native linux filesystem that is persistant (all changes are saved). I discovered that a journaling filesystem would greatly increase the number of writes to the stick thereby shortening its lifetime so I went with ext2, the well documented, non-journaling, workhorse of linux filesystems.

  For some reason my computer's bios will only boot from the 4th partition of a usb thumbdrive. I expect this is because the first real storage devices in usb were zip drives. (I could be wrong on this). My motherboard was discontinued and the last bios upgrade is dated 2005.

Here is the procedure that I used to create a boot-able usb stick using ext2 and NOT fat16 or vfat. Its extremly important to know which sd device name the usb stick gets in your linux installation. Use "dmesg | grep sd" or "cat /proc/partition" at the command line to be sure. Don't zero out the wrong storage device!