Am trying to boot from a usb stick. Have carefully followed the instructions at the following link and successfully downloaded and installed version Ubuntu 12.04 desk top:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

I used the Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.0.2 as instructed and choose the "Ubuntu 12.04 desk top" option, after downloading the respective iso/zip file onto my Dell laptop from the Ubuntu site.

Also modified my bios to select the usb first as boot drive instead of hard drive. Also, turned off bit blocker on my laptop and usb stick. Usb stick has the setting of "Automatically unlock this drive on this computer".

When i reboot my laptop, it first boots into a black screen (i assume is the bios), but prompts saying "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to start". I press any key and regardless the laptop boots up to windows. Hence, it appears that the boot process is checking the USB first before going to the hard drive to look for it's boot disk and starting Windows 7.

Is it that the USB stick is not correctly configured with Ubuntu as a boot disk? Is there anything else that i need to do besides the instructions at the following link?

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

How can I ensure that USB boot stick is configured correctly? After running the Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.0.2 to "install" Ubuntu, is there additional configuration/installation steps?

What is the first file that the bios would look for on this USB drive? Is this configured somewhere in the bios, or would it just look for an grub file or /boot dir?

The only message i get when booting is "Remove disks or other media. Press any key to start".

Any and all help would be much appreciated.. Thanks ... :)