I am having a bad day...

I bought a new 40GB USB hard drive to install linux on. I installed Mandrake 9.1. Upon completion of the installation, I could not boot up to Linux. I've come to discover that my laptop's BIOS does not support booting from USB devices. So, I ended up using my installation cd to go into rescue mode and reinstall my windows bootloader. Is there any way for me to boot up Linux?

I am really completely new at this and I am totally frustrated. But I don;t want to give up!

Can anyone help me?

-motely
and ready to start

One option would be to resize the laptop hard drive and install linux on it. Then use the USB drive to share data between windows and linux.

I know that is an option, but isn't there a way I can make a boot floppy that can access my installation on the USB drive?

Thanks,
motely

Today is a slightly better day!

Does anyone know if I can run modprobe from a disk? and how I would do that.

I'm trying to create a boot disk and need it to recognize my USB drive before it boots linux.

Thanks,
motely