chimeraxp

I have been trying different ways for the past week with no luck , I have been googling and Searching forum after forum , trying all the different ways people have done it , in face I have done it before twice now. I have tried a number of differnet USB thumb drives , 2Gb and 8 GB drives seems the most common issue I'm having is grub4dos says it can't install and goes on to installing MBR , but when I boot to the USB drive it either just says can't boot from it . or it skips step one option and only shows step 2 gui , it's becoming very frustrating . I have tried the following progrmas Wintoflash winsetuptoUSB manual files PEtoUSB Bootsect USB_prep8 USB Multiboot all of which have fail on me , with all my usb drives . USB multi even told me that I didn't have fat fat32 or NTFS and I couldn't go any further , I tried formating with both PE and HP format programs. I have noticed that I had go in the the properties of each program and run as admin.or it wouldn't find my usb drive or give me other nasty errors . i'm not sure if my whole problem is i'm using my windows 7 laptop. the usb install is for my dell mini 9 . so it has no optical drive I just removed ubunto linux from it to load windows xp back on. whats a good base to start with ?