After wasting hours of my time getting this done through various oddball tools, I hit on one called Rufus. From that point on, it’s been smooth sailing! Highly recommend this tool to anyone wanting to make a windows installation USB.
A friend’s laptop had crashed and so as the computer geek I got the job of restoring her OS. She gave me the recovery cd, but since it was an ultrabook there wasn’t really a cd drive. So since I couldn’t find myself a portable cd drive, I settled on trying to make a bootable USB stick. I found a ton of online tools like the Windows 7 USB download tool, but invariably I ran into one issue or the other. I tried unetbootin, but that’s really a tool for creating Linux installation CDs or USBs. And with amazing luck I found Rufus and I’ve tried it with the original windows cd and the restore disk and both boot fine from USB.