Thank you for your quick reply. I would have been happy to post my menu.lst. However, just before I read your note, I re-ran LiLi (Linux Live USB Creator). It happily deleted my entire /boot subdirectory. I will have to recreate it. Also, an fstab assumes that something's booted. The USB is ignored at this point (the OS is on the stick, I'm not booting to another disk).

After running LiLi again, the stick is still not bootable. I don't get errors, it is completely ignored. The first time I ran LiLi on this stick, it worked great. However the USB has become "invisible" as a boot device ever since trying to install Grub.

Prior to running LiL the 2nd time, I tried to run syslinux directly, but got the error "this doesn't look like a valid FAT filesystem". The -f option did not help. GParted and fdisk continue to show a partition w/fat32 and the WinXP partition manager reports a healty fs.

All of your examples that I found (granted I haven't read all of them yet), follow your good advice to install OS-specific boot loaders into the partition boot sector for that OS. Cool. But the first step is to add Grub to the MBR, yes? How do I do that, and how do I troubleshoot when it fails? I assume that a stick with one primary partition has both an MBR and a partition boot sector, but it sure acts like there's no MBR.

Usually when something this easy fails so completely, there's something very basic that I'm missing. Thank you again,