How do I install Lion onto a USB thumb drive or SD card

Hi, folks..
I'm not asking about how to create a Lion installation thumb drive or SD card, or copy the recovery partition to a USB drive or SD card. I already have a backup Lion install thumb drive. What I am hoping to do is create a bootable Lion thumb drive or SD card on which I can also have Drive Genius and other utilities -- so I can boot from the thumb drive or SD card and work on my unmouted nternal hard drive.
Is it as simple as installing Lion onto the thumb drive or SD card, or is there more to it than that?
I've tried searching for this, but everything I've found has been about creating an install SD or thumb drive.
Thanks in advance!

Okay, so I ran the Lion Install app and directed it to install onto my USB thumb drive. Everything looked like it was doing what I wanted, and since the screen showed that it would take about 17 minutes I stepped away for about a half-hour. When I came back my screen was off, and when I pressed a key the progress bar said it would take another 11 minutes. Huh? I went away again for another half-hour, and when I returned the progress bar hadn't moved -- still 11 minutes.
Okay, I was working on a USB drive, no big thing. No keypresses did anything, so I hit the power button on my Mcbook Pro, shut the sytem down, then started it back up. It booted to a screen to setup Lion. Hmmm.... I shut the system down (this time from the Apple menu), pulled the USB thumb drive, powered back up, and ended up at the same place.
I rebooted, this time holding the Alt key, and saw that my Macintosh HD had been renamed to something about install. Booting from that partition gave me no option but to complete a Lion installation.
Thankfully I have a Time Machine backup, and the recovery partition worked, so my system is back up (although some of my preferences seem to have changed, even though my backup was current -- another "huh?").
So, what did I do wrong?

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