USB flash drive not being recognized as a startup disk?

Hi everyone, I've been searching for similar questions but haven't found one that exactly matches my experience. So, I'm going to try and explain my issue in hopes that others may be able to help.
I'm trying to create a bootable flash drive from which I can install lion, and eventually Mountain Lion when it is released onto my main hard drive. My main reason for doing this is to have a way that I can perform a clean install of the operating system. Yes, I know I am old fashioned, but sometimes I prefer clean operating system installs rather than upgrading. In any case, I have downloaded the lion setup file from the Mac app store (Install Mac OS X Lion.app) and am following the directions given on this page to do this procedure. These directions are consistent with directions found on various other sources online. Having this file saved to my hard drive, I was able to find and extract the disk image file from the package InstallESD.dmg to another folder. Once extracted, I plugged in my flash drive and attempted to use disk utility to restore the disk image to my flash drive. I selected the dmg file as my source and the flash drive as the destination. I then clicked restore and was warned that all data on the flash drive would be erased while the disk image was restored to my flash drive. I was prepared for this, so I allowed the process to continue, and it appeared to proceed with no problem. When disk utility was finished, I did a quick look at my flash drive using finder and confirmed that it did in fact appear to contain a disk image of the .dmg file. Here's where things get interesting however.
When I go to system preferences and choose startup disk, my flash drive is not listed as an optional disk from which to boot, only my hard drive ("macintosh HD"). When I restart and hold down the option key, my flash drive is not listed as a startup disk either. I know that the non-intel based macs are not capable of booting from USB, but this is certainly not my issue as I have an intel macbook pro, mid 2009 model. My flash drive is about 4 or 5 years old; it is a PNY Technologies Attaché 16 gb flash drive. I have no trouble viewing and transferring files to and from the flash drive, the only issue is that my computer seems to refuse to recognize it as a startup disk. Are there certain flash drives which do not support booting? This would normally seem more like a computer issue rather than a flash drive issue, but most people seem to have no problem doing what I'm trying to do. Unfortunately I do not have another flash drive with which to test this, and I didn't really feel like buying another flash drive just to test this out if in fact this is not a flash drive issue. I am planning to upgrade to the macbook pro retina soon which of course does not have an optical drive, which is one of the reasons I would like to get this working. Can anyone think of something else I can try? Is it more likely an issue with the macbook pro or the flash drive?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

The format says Mac OS Extended. All of the settings were set during the disk image restore process. Even if I format the flash drive as extended journaled or some other format, all of these settings are reverted when I do the restore from the disk image. I will just copy all of the information that disk utility has so that you can see it.
Mount Point : /Volumes/Mac OS X Install ESD Capacity : 16.11 GB (16,106,110,976 Bytes) Format : Mac OS Extended Available : 12.3 GB (12,303,499,264 Bytes) Owners Enabled : Yes Used : 3.8 GB (3,802,611,712 Bytes) Number of Folders : 128 Number of Files : 876

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USB flash drive not being recognized as a startup disk?

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