it seems my pendrive died on me, even thought if i could boot from it i doubt it it could work.
Actually physical destroying your pendrive is /almost/ impossible (unless you used a hammer or a saw
).
Usually you can fix such things by writing the (raw) image file to the pendrive again.
Note that there are pendrives that use a very big/slow cache when writing to it. It reminds me of old TDK pendrives i had that took about 3 minutes (after aros indicated it was done with installing itself onto such a pendrive) before the drive was actually finished (luckily for me the pendrive had a small read/write indicator light).
Long story short: if you were able to boot from the Icaros Desktop pendrive and was able to play around a little then you can also install Icaros to the pendrive and boot from it as there is no difference there. Most BIOS' are able to boot from legacy USB (your machine should be able to as well, although that conclusion is based on the year in which your hardware was released). what brand laptop you tried this on HP ? lenovo ? other ?
I have no idea what has gone wrong there for you but the cat eyes is an indication that it can't find the boot device that contains the aros boot-partition/files.