hi all,

i'm trying to make my own little live distro 'cause i have particular needs that no live distro seem to cover entirely. so i'm experimenting alot. at last i realized that making it directly on a usb stick instead of just saving files there, would be a far better solution. thing is, my BIOS doesn't seem to support usb booting, and that's weird, 'cause i booted from usb before.. bah, bios' misteries.. anyway, what i need is to have a cd able to boot a usb key. i've been searching alot on google, i saw there are some live distros that offer this feature (like slax), but it only works for them, i need.. let's say a universal one, as i'm building my own. someone has an idea?

OK-I also have a laptop that won't boot from usb-this is how I did it-
Download Plop Bootmanager ( http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html ).
Unzip the folder, go into the "install" folder, copy the "plpbtin.img" to a formatted floppy-hopefully you have a floppy drive.
With the floppy in the drive, open a terminal and copy the image to the floppy-example- "dd if=/home/bz/Desktop/plpbtin.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k"
This will make the floppy-now boot from the floppy, choose #1 full install, then hit any key till you get to where it says choose #7-reboot.
Quickly take out the floppy- a starfield screen should appear letting you boot form HD/CDROM/USB, etc.
Choose USB-and have your USB already inserted. Note-sometimes it will not work on the first or second try-if it freezes trying to boot the usb-reboot and it should then boot the usb.
Questions-how are you setting up the usb?Syslinux?
What distro are you trying to boot from USB?
Also note-the plop bootmanager can be uninstalled easily after you get your distro on the USB-without affecting your grub/lilo-just do a full uninstall-#4.
Any problems please post again-I have much experience in regards to the boot from usb issues.

hehe.. i haven't got a floppy, i'm on a laptop. thanks alot anyway!
for your questions, i don't know what it will be like at last. i'm still deciding if building it on a debian, slackware or gentoo base, and what method to use.. perhaps with linux live scripts or referring to the debian-live project.. i'm doing a lot of experimenting, that's why i wondered if there was a simple way to boot a usb from cd. what i've thought is, while i'm still experimenting, to boot it from my MBR, just from grub, but that would solve half problem, since i'll have to boot it on older machine anyway, 99.9% of wich won't have grub on their MBR. 80% of these machines won't probably have a floppy drive anyway.. so a cd is the only way to go for me.

As I mentioned the Plop Bootmanager site also has a LiveCD.
The better choice might be grml linux-it's a very powerful tool-more stuff than even Knoppix-it comes as LiveCD and can install-it also installs to USB-luckily I know how as it doesn't say so on the website-
http://grml.org/