can GRUB kickstart a CD/DVD boot from a USB drive?

[miker00lz]

so i have an older Pentium 3 laptop, a toshiba portege 7140CT.. it's one of those laptops designed to be light and easy on battery, so that means no CD drive and no floppy. you have to have the docking station to use optical media.... and i don't have it. i was given this machine for free some years back.

i have a USB external DVD-RW drive, and what i want to do is configure GRUB to kickstart a CD/DVD boot from it if possible. obviously, being an old P3 laptop the BIOS has no concept of USB boot. is there a way to pull this off?

thanks!

and before anybody suggests it, no i'm not going to buy a new laptop.

all i need to do with it is word processing, playing some mp3s, thunderbird, and maybe some light web browsing. seems a waste of money to get something new just for that.

[psic]

Something like this? Though I think a P3 bios should support boot from USB, especially since it has no optical drive... Have you tried bringing up the boot selection menu during boot-up?