I also need to scuttle off - but I wonder whether there isn't something to do with the hardware (the netbook) itself that needs attention.

Might be worth searching their forums for problems booting off USB drives, without even mentioning Linux, in case there's a simple solution.

Other than checking that your smaller drive is formatted as FAT32, there's no preparation necessary so far as I'm aware.

Unetbootin will wipe any data off the flash drive as it makes its own preparations - simply a matter of remembering to copy anything you want to keep to another drive before starting.

I've no idea why it wipes data. If you view the contents of the drive after Unetbootin's done its thing, there always seems lots of free space - suspect it's something to do with making the drive bootable.

Off for a spot of real life - hope you continue to progress.

A little more Unetbootin gen here, if you've not already seen it:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki/guide