Here are some errors I forgot to mention. You may have trouble with splashimages when you set up GRUB in Debian/Elive/etc. This is because the version of GRUB installed is too old and does not include support. You can fix this by finding a newer DEB to install or compile the newest GRUB version from source.

Otherwise if your image does not work, double check that it is indexed to 14 colors and that your (hdX,X) points to the correct partition of your flash drive. For me, upon booting from USB, my flash drive is named (hd0), but depending on your computer and its BIOS version, this could be different. Experiment or search.