Bootable flash drive

[Nathan England]

I am trying to make a bootable USB flash drive. This is just a regular 2 GB 
PNY flash device from walmart for 12 bucks. Nothing special. I have read a 
dozen sites how to make this work, and they all focus on formatting the device 
with fat16. However, I have a PC-BSD image that I dd'd onto it and it boots 
and works just dandy, however it does not have a fat16 partition on it.

How do I create a bootable flash drive with an ext partition?

This really cannot be this complicated, can it? My laptop will boot off a USB 
device. I tried just creating a partition and formatting it ext2, making it 
bootable with fdisk and putting what I wanted on it, however I just get 
errors... and not the kind like my boot scripts are not working.  I have so 
far used GRUB... maybe that is my problem, but everything else uses syslinux, 
which again, wants fat16...

I appreciate any help or pointers,

Nathan