I’ve always found it a major pain to correctly install a Live CD on a thumb drive. You want to do this because of SPEED. Have you tried running Backtrack from a thumb drive? Load times are incredible and there’s none of that annoying spin of the cd drive. Of course it’s faster, you’re comparing optical media to solid state. Just like my R1 to your Civic SI….
The tool could not be simpler, feed it any .ISO and tell it which mounted device it should install to. It will handle creating the necessary [boot] partitions and sizing accordingly. So far I’ve tried it with Backtrack 3, 4 and Helix.
Download the multi-platform tool here: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/