Boot from cd with system on usb hdd

[doctordruidphd]

Hello,
I am trying to install debian linux on a laptop that already has XP. I would like to put linux on a USB hard drive, as there really isn't room on the internal hdd at this point. It appears that the bios will not allow me to boot off anything USB, but it will let me boot off a CD. So, I would like to set up the system so I can put in a CD to boot linux, and then have the entire system on the USB hdd.
Can this be done, and if so, can someone point me to a HOWTO or other source as to how I might do it.
There is another alternative: the internal hdd has a small partition used to store an OEM version of windows. I have made the CD kit, so I could wipe out that partition and use it to boot linux. But I still want the system on the USB drive. Possible?
Thank You in advance for any assistance.

[El_FLuffo]

I hope I understood your question ok, but if your BIOS won't allow you to boot from a USB stick, then it won't allow you to boot from a USB stick! Use a live CD or reduce the size of your windo$e partition (Partition Magic, etc) and install Debian on the free space.
There are certain distros specially made for installation on a usb stick (Pentoo comes to mind) but again, if your BIOS won't allow booting from a usb stick, then you're stuck with the choice between using a live CD, repartitioning or using Linux with VMWare (for example) from within windo$e.
Hope this helps...

[doctordruidphd]

No, not quite. Let me try (hopefully) to make this clearer.
I have a laptop with Win XP on its hard drive. I do not want to touch the internal hard drive in any way. I have a USB hard drive that I want to put debian on.
The problem is that while both Knoppix and the debian installer see the USB hard drive, the computer's bios does not. So what I would like to do, if possible, is install debian on the USB hard drive, and use a CD to boot it. That way, I don't have to tamper with the internal hard drive at all.
So, is this possible, and if so, how do I go about making (or downloading) a CD that will boot the system on the USB hard drive? (Given that I don't have any linux installed at present, and therefore can't use makeisofs or such things. I can burn downloaded iso images.)
One other thing. I found grub4dos and installed it, but it does not see the USB hard drive either.

[doctordruidphd]

Problem Solved.
For those who may be interested, the way I did it was to set up grub4dos on the windows drive, and insert a line in the end of XP's boot.ini file calling grub4dos, as explained in grub4dos's documentation. This results in XP's ntldr calling up grub. (Note: DO NOT follow the directions for installing grub into the MBR!)
Next thing I did was go ahead and build the system on he external USB hard drive. Of course the system does not see this at boot up, so what I did was copy (via a FAT32 partition I set up on the USB drive specifically for exchanging data between XP and debian) the following files from debian's /boot directory:
initrd.img-2.6.18-4-686
config-2.6.18-4-686
vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686
System.map-2.6.18-4-686
/boot/grub/menu.lst
Getting back into XP, I copied the first 4 files into c:\boot, and menu.lst into c:\boot\grub (overwriting the menu.last that comes with grub4dos). I then edited menu.lst so that it looks for the boot files on hd0 instead of hd1. What this does is point grub4dos to the files necessary for debian to boot. Evidently everything necessary for debian to start is built into these files, and they mount the USB drive and point to the necessary files there once debian is up and running.
Purists may gag at this, but I succeeded in accomplishing what I wanted:
to set up debian on an external drive without compromising my XP installation in any way.