Booting off a usb drive on a pc that does not support it

Ulysees

I would like to boot off a usb drive on a pc that does not support it.

Has anyone thought of booting off a cd and transferring the start-up to the usb drive?

NoTime

Dual boot setup perhaps.
You could also check for a BIOS update.

mgb_phys

There are lots of ways of making a USB key bootable depending on what OS you want to run from it, but f the PC bios doesn't support booting of a USB drive then there is nothing you can do about it.

Ulysees

In the old days of linux you could boot off a floppy and optionally chain the boot to the hard disk boot sector to run windows. Someone must have thought the same for a cd-rom boot as the first step. Also linux liveCD's can see most usb drives.

I forgot to say, the pc does not have a hard disk.

mgb_phys

Linux is generally easy to boot from a usb key, see puppy linux or DSL for examples.
Booting windows is tricky but can be done - see bartpe.

But if your bios doesn't support booting from usb then you are SOL, it doesn't matter what is on the key if the machine isn't looking at it!
Sometimes it takes a few different techniques to boot a pariculalr older PC you can make the USB key look like either a floppy, hard disc or CDROM.
Any modern BIOS will boot quite happily from a USB.

Ulysees

Thanks but I know this, it's a DSL flash disk I have made and want to use on a pc that does not support usb boot, as I say in the title.

There's an area in every partition called the boot record, that contains software like lilo or grub among with other information. It can be programmed to do what is required, except the space available is too small to load a usb driver from it. So I was thinking of loading the usb drivers afterwards, like a liveCD does, and then going back to 16-bit mode to execute the master boot record of the usb drive. Someone must have thought that.

joeseppe

Correct 100%

Ulysees

I've explained how it is possible (it's just software), but since the description must have been above you, let's go straight to the final result, that I eventually found:

Booting Knoppix from a USB Pendrive via Floppy

Ed Aboud

I highly recommend knoppix, its great and so easy to setup. You can run it of a cd or a usb.

Ulysees

I like it too, the DSL that I am using is a remaster of knoppix.

In fact DSL probably makes the ideal host for vmware, because it is so small in memory and disk space requirements and can be made even smaller.