Darik's Boot and Nuke

So I have managed to get my USB working and booting, but I am having trouble actually getting DBAN to respond at all after it boots. At first it would hang on the black screen that gives credit to one of the creators of DBAN and not progress to the blue screen as it should. After much shenanigans I reformatted the USB from FAT32 to FAT and was able to progress to level 2 - the blue GUI!! However, when I type anything (see: autonuke) it does not recognise my keystrokes, no letters appear, nothing happens. The same is true with the F keys - again nothing happens. I basically have to power off and boot back in windows to try to find a fix. I'm using dban-2.2.6_i586 on a 5 year old USB installed using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.0.4 to wipe a Toshiba Satellite laptop. I have also successfully booted Ubuntu from a USB so I am pretty sure its not the boot itself (at least on the laptop end) which is falling over. Is this because I formatted to FAT? Any other ideas?