Installing Ubuntu on a flash drive

I decided that instead of installing Ubuntu on a hard drive I would just install it on a flash drive, I will only use it for the internet only so good performence dosen't really matter. However I'm having trouble booting from the flash drive. My bios has the option of booting from (USB-CDROM, USB-ZIP, USB-FDD) I set it to USB-ZIP and it sees the flash drive however it says that it is an INVALID something and that I should take it out and press enter. Does anybody have any idea how to fix this?

When you installed Ubuntu, did you tell it to put the bootloader on the flash drive?

Also, make sure that you have partitioned the flash drive. Usually they come with just the filesystem and you can not boot this kind of drives with normal bootloaders.

I didn't install boot loader because I didn't want my XP boot config messed with, hmm I think I will just unplug my hard drive, boot live cd and install with boot loader.

I used the instructions for loading Ubuntu 7.10 from www.pendrivelinux.com on a 2gig usb drive. Ubuntu runs just great. No problems of any kind. I have used it in several computers. You will need to run basic video if you you plan on using it on different computers. Any changes are saved to the USB drive.
It takes longer than expected to load but once loaded is very fast.

Monton