... I have my windows 7 OS on a flash drive ...
First, to boot from a USB stick you need to make sure you can select it to boot from.
Press F12 to invoke BOOT menu or restart (Alt+Ctrl+Del) ,after you ve inserted the USB stick, to make sure it appears in the BIOS boot menu order.
The same you do when you update BIOS, the USB stick must be inserted and one restart made before you can proceed.
You should also make sure the stick is inserted in the USB 2.0 ports as the USB 3.0 ports supplied by 3-rd party chips will not work until drivers are loaded(opposed to the FM2 platform where USB 3.0 is natively supported by the AMD chipset)
Then you are not saying if you have it on the stick as installation media(DVD replacement) or as a portable OS.
W7 does not work as a portable OS and if it does it s not what Microsoft intended to and the probability to work is unknown.
You should specify the full hardware configuration nevertheless.