Working with an acer netbook having only 8GB of hard drive. Trying to connect through the usb port an external hard drive. Have used bios to arrange the boot sequence as: 1-usb hdd; 2-usb cdrom; 3-usb fdd; 4-networkboot, legacy pci device; 5-IDE1;6-IDE0:SSDPAMM000861.
The only two it will accept are #4 & #6, with 6 the default.
A 150 gb sata usb connection got light on enclosure, but nothing on screen; a 20 gb ide/pata with windows 98 did get screen action, but only to say that didn't have enough memory storage to handle it so shutting off. Any suggestions? (my ram is 1.5gb).

Have you set usb as a boot option? Can you? boxen of a certain vintage don't do that.

It may still be possible as follows. Backup ide0; make a small boot partition, with a kernel, and ramdisk giving all the usb stuff; have a root=/dev/sdbx option on the kernel command line. You can probably just burn a cd to test the idea first.

Sorry business kid, I don't understand. On my listed boot order, the very first 3 are all usb; do you mean to boot from the usb just as flash drive?

USB hard drives may end up in a few places. Turn off everything to a full cold boot. Then power up usb HD and then power up cpu to bios. See if the hd shows up under the real hard drives and move it up above installed drive.

We need to be sure that the usb is really a bootable version of some distro? Is it? Has it been tested on other systems?

If you can't set usb in the boot order ( in the Bios - Advanced, or chipset), there is a fundamental problem. Check the bios, and see if you can.

I've got an Acer netbook (AOA150; similar to the AOA110 but has a 120GB HDD rather than the 8GB SSD). When pressing F12 to get the boot menu, I only see options for connected devices. I've currently got two bootable USB flash drives connected; they show up as .
Looking at the BIOS setup page (pressing F2 at boot), I see for Boot priority order
I don't have an external HDD or cdrom drive to check them out. Sorry I can't offer any useful advice.

Yes jefro, the hard drive is a real os that has been used before (windows XP), and the listing as first for boot was in the bios and on my little 8GB linux when checked that. I added a 8GB SD card and used both usb connectors (didn't before) for this external hdd, and finally it was recognized and I did get a screen showing Windows XP, BUT -- it then switched off (each of many tries) and stated was a problem (unspecified) and would I like to try other options (none of which worked, including Safe Mode), and finally left with only return to "prior configuration" that did work, which put me back where I started.
Should have enough memory (ram of 1.5 gb and open unused solid hd of 4gb, plus the 8gb of the SD card), plus thought the hdd itself should be able to handle any memory requirements, so don't see why it won't operate. It's an Acer Aspire One AOA110 with that 8gb solid hard drive, but don't see why that should cause a problem in booting these external hard disk drives.
Thanks for your input, and any additional suggestions much appreciated.

Windows wants to boot off the first hard drive. The internal drive is going to be the first hard drive, regardless of the BIOS boot order; the external USB drive will be the second. In order to boot Win98 (or WinXP) off an external drive, you're going to have to create an entry in the configuration file of the bootloader on the internal drive to remap the drives, then chainload the Windows boot loader on the external HDD. I believe Linpus Linux (the Linux shipped on the AOA110's SSD) uses the grub bootloader, which means you should see a file called grub.conf in the boot directory of your SSD. It's this file that will need to be modified; the needed entry will look something like this (don't quote me; look it up! - I'm doing it from memory, and it's been a long time since I actually did it!)

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