Booting Knoppix from a thumb drive
 

I know there was a question about this already in the forums but the link to was broken to this process in windows. So can someone tell me how to do this in windows. i have a 1 gb drive

I am not sure from Windows and I haven't done it in Linux, but if you have a distro of Knoppix live or any installed distro, this is what I would try. This should give basic functionality of linux from a usb stick.

Bootup with CD or installed
Use fdisk to setup the parition, example /sbin/fdisk /dev/uba
Then use dd to copy your master boot record from your hard drive. example dd if=/dev/hdc of=/dev/uba bs=512 count=1
Then mount /dev/uba1 and make directories of /, /boot, /bin
cp the contents of /boot, /bin from your HD
modify the boot loader config file so that it will find your uba device on the appropriate block device, modify the kernel line to be like: kernel /vmlinux ro root=LABEL=/ init=/bin/bash

When you boot init=/bin/bash will load the kernel and then run a bash shell. You are in linux.

Here is an example of making the partition but I will do it in a file. Remember Linux treats everything as files, even devices. So, I use a file and make linux think it is a drive and partition.

Here I create a 1024 by 1024 byte file named partition, filled with zeros. The file command asks what is the file, the answer is data.

here I copy my master boot record in to the file, without truncating it. The file command now says that min-partition is a bootable partition.