I got Fedora 9 installed on an external USB harddisk and want to boot it from a floppy. On a system that fully supports USB harddisk boot, it works fine.

My own computer is useless at booting from USB. I have updated the BIOS to the latest version I could find for my board and I tried a load of methods including 'gdisk'ing the drive as a 'Zip' drive, using a USB memory stick (which nearly worked - starts grub but then can't see the USB external harddisk, even going to grub command line and typing 'root (<tab>' to find the drive )

I tried moving the USB memory stick boot process to a bootable floppy, but a couple of the required files (vmlinuz-2.6.25-14.fc9.i686 for eg.) are 2mb - too big for the floppy?!

The next possibility is the make a bootable CD to get it started - but I expect the floppy method will be easier because of the test-change-tryagain cycle.

I looked at other threads like this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...oot-cd-652145/

and found loads of references to 'Live' distro's installed to USB - they were not helpful.

Here's the Grub site with instructions:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...UB-boot-floppy

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/ISOLINUX and http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX.
you need to load a small OS in to ram so it can load the drivers to see the USB drive.
this will do it and also like yancek said you can work with grub to boot it. If you can boot from a cdrom it would let you have much more options and you could use bigger kernel.

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I have explored in part and am getting somewhere, I don;t have much time to put on this though.