I had the same situation as described in #9 above. I.e. "Could it be that the problem is that my (real) system is treating the thumb drive as "USB RMD-FDD" (is that ReMovable Device - Floppy Disk Drive?)" I had selected USB RMD-FDD as first device to boot from.
Instead of accessing the USB stick, my machine was accessing the Floppy Disk Drive. I disabled the FDD in the BIOS and now the machine boots from the USB stick.
I had the same situation as described in #9 above. I.e. "Could it be that the problem is that my (real) system is treating the thumb drive as "USB RMD-FDD" (is that ReMovable Device - Floppy Disk Drive?)" I had selected USB RMD-FDD as first device to boot from.
Instead of accessing the USB stick, my machine was accessing the Floppy Disk Drive. I disabled the FDD in the BIOS and now the machine boots from the USB stick.