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

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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:

http://linuxgazette.net/116/okopnik1.html" [Broken]

 

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.