My laptop is a little old, so it doesn't support booting from USB in the BIOS. On top of that, it doesn't give me any boot options; it just goes to Windows (I guess technically it does, but they're all Windows options). I don't have any floppies at the moment either... I'm trying to use Feather Linux on a USB drive and I was wondering if anyone knows of a good bootloader I can install that will let me boot from USB.

Have you gone into the BIOS to see if there is a boot option to boot from CD or DVD?
Almost any machine after the P1 era offers that option.

Well, that's just the thing...this laptop doesn't really *have* BIOS options. I've gone to them and it's just options for different ways to start windows. I mean, it boots to a plain black screen with no command line at all, then just goes almost immediately to the Windows loading screen. This computer just doesn't have accessible boot options; you have to use a floppy or boot from the internal hard drive.

I got a spare floppy just today from a friend, so that part's pretty much taken care of, but I am still curious if there's any way to do what I want to without a floppy; it might help someone else in a similar situation.

What make and model of laptop do you have? They all have BIOS. I have never seen one that you couldn't acces boot options. There will be a 'hot key' to get to the BIOS, you simply press the key after power on and before the system starts to boot. The BIOS checks the hardware, and reads the BIOS settings for booting. It is what sends the hard drive heads to reab the master boot record. If you didn't have a BIOS, windbloze would never load.

Yes, I know. I press F5 when it's starting up and I get what looks like a BIOS...but it only gives me Windows options. See, every computer I've ever used shows something in the command line before loading Windows, but this one doesn't show anything; it just sits at a black screen for about 3 seconds before going straight to the Windows loading screen.

To answer your question, it's a crappy little Compaq Presario that's about 5 years old, but I don't know the exact model number. It's ok though, I was just curious to know if anyone knew of a way to do what I wanted without messing with the BIOS because this computers BIOS is very, very Windows biased. :P

IMO your accessing a windows startup menu and not the BIOS. The function of F5 depends on the version of windows you are running.

Restart the laptop and when the color screen with the logo appears press the F1 key on the keyboard. This should enter the BIOS setup menu.

Some BIOS's just won't boot USB. I've got that problem. But if you can get a network connection in Windows, you could always try a net-only install... there's decent instructions here:

http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html

If you post the exact model, I can find out how to access the BIOS. There is a hot hey to do it. The model information may be on a tag on the bottom. A lot of Presarios have it marked on the LCD panel. Compaq has a lot of the hardware doc online for their machines.

Ah...I didn't really think about Windows having it's own options menu. *smacks self in head* Duh...

This thing is a Presario 700; I'll go look it up on their site, but thanks for mentioning that. I may have grown up with computers but I didn't even think to check their site...