USB booting :: Can't even get a welcome screen

Trying to boot from my Sandisk 256 flash drive. I could get a partial bootup on my Dell laptop, but it crashed. I cannot even get the boot screen on my desktop. I have tried set my first boot device to both
USB-ZIP and USB-HDD, but neither work. My system is a AMD with a dual BIOS from Promise Technology. The motherboard is a Gigabyte.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.

neilford

on some bios's the usb drive shows up as a proper hard disk, i.e choose HDD. also, there maybe a sub-menu to select the first priority hard drive that is auto-detected in the bios or during boot-up, select USB Storage Device from there.

original here.