Need to test USB stick from PC with limited options. Cant boot via bios because USB-FDD only, no work around for usb pendrive. No floppy drive either.

Tried booting DSL cdrom to get to boot prompt then command : dsl fromusb , but it just boots off cdrom and ignores the usb stick. Any ideas?

You could use the smart boot manager?
you could install a small linux boot image to the hdd, boot from that, which loads DSl from the usb stick?

you could test the stick in someone elses computer.

sorry if im being a thick but I looked up smart boot manager an that appears to be floppy based. My floppy drive doesnt work.

How exactly do you install a boot image to hdd. I know how to install the floppy img to floppy but this is getting out of my depth.

er I have grub installed. Is there a command that I can put in grub to get it to boot dsl on /dev/sda1 ???

cheers for help anyway.

If you are able to get the grub menu, then press escape and get into the grub shell.

Grub uses devices that look like (hd0,0) instead of /dev/sda1 and /dev/hda1. If the computer also has a hard drive, I don't know how it will be referenced, however, you can use the autocompletion feature to locate where the kernel is:

Type in "kernel (hd" and press the tab key. You will be presented with the possible drives present. Enter in one of the choices such as "kernel (hd1," and press tab again. Continue until you find a /boot directory on one of the partitions. Add "/boot" to the end of the entry and press tab again. You should find the kernel and the mvlinuz file this way.
example:
These three lines should be enough for you to boot. Provided that the usb drive is detected.

thanks for that. A very useful piece of info. I must learn more about grub.

Im giving up on this issue as my usb is not detected whilst in grub. i did manage on a friends laptop to boot a floppy omag then test pendrive.

Anybody know why I cant put the floppy imag for boot on a cdrom?

You can.
Look in the www.tldp.org web site. You might also want to read documentation in the the /boot or /syslinux directory of a linux installation disk. Keep in mind that the linux 2.6 kernel doesn't fit in a floppy disk so you can't have a disk containing the kernel and another with initrd as you used to be able to do.

If you burn a disk with k3b, you can click on a button to "Modify the bootable settings of the current project" and then load in an image file.

thanks for the reply. I will definately take a look. Being a newbie, there is so much to read and understand.

Each time I find a solution it just throughs up more questions.

This linux usb stick thing has been going round and round. All I really understood a few weeks back was that to dual boot my machine I needed lilo on the mbr of my windows harddisk to boot my mandriva hard drive.

Then the memorystick project ... DSL makes one large fat partition on 4 gb stick why? Enter fdisk ? enter sfdisk ? Got the partions sorted.

whys the partion need to be FAT 16 if im booting off bios? still aint got a clue on that one.

whys peoples tutorials always adding syslinux? whats syslinux? a boot loader.... enter mtools apparently theres some sort of syslinux dependency that needs mtools .... enter grub....whats wrong with lilo? Still dont see why I want a bootloader on pendrive...more reading.... mv syslinux.config to isolinux.config ....eh? and so it goes on.

Sure im learning loads of stuff. But when am I actually going to get on with something.