Hello everyone;

I have been experimenting to boot machines using a USB flash drive.
I've installed Knoppix and DSL and managed to get them booting up the PC's by only enabling USB boot from bios and setting the Boot device to USBdisk.

But i can't get my own PC to boot up using the USB drive.When i go to my bios settings; i enable USB boot and set USBdisk to be the first boot device;however when i boot the machine all i get, is a black screen with the letter j displayed on the far left corner of the screen.

I know i have the USB drive set up correctly because it works on newer machines.
Below are my machines specifications.

Pent III,733
Intel D815EEA motherboard( on board USB )
Ami Bios 815 series (EA81510A.86.A.0051.P11.0106190714)

I have looked at the motherboard and bios manufacturers sites but they havent got any support or a real BIOS update for the 815 series. I found a few BIOS updates which made no real changes to my BIOS settings and were not for updating the USB support.

Can anyone suggest a way of getting my machine to boot up from the USB drive.

May be something to do with how the distro boots up and your bios. I can't boot dsl on my own machine but can on other pcs but puppy boots on everything. If I remember there are two options on the puppy live cd to install on usb sticks and one worked for me the other didn't.
Try a dsl boot floppy if you don't fancy trying puppy - http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i.../Boot_Floppies