USB Boot Drive

[mur]

I have an old laptop with Windows ME, and I am trying to make it boot my Damn Small Linux USB memory stick. Iomega who made the memory stick, makes no drivers for ME, so I extracted the USBstor.sys from the base2 file. This should be the rite driver, now I am confused about using DUSE to install these drivers in teh BIOS to allow me to boot off my USB drive. By the way, I cannot boot off of a floppy or CD as they are broken.

Please Help,
Mur

[drakebasher]

I don't think you want to install anything to your BIOS. I saw 2 different USB sticks at the DSL web site:

One runs within Windows, but apparently requires WinXP and of course requires the right driver. Sounds like this isn't what you have.

The other requires that your computer be able to boot from the USB which should not require any additional software.

So the question is, when you turn on your computer, can you go to the BIOS setup screen and select for the system to boot from the USB port, as opposed to C:\ or floppy? If not, it sounds like you may need to look into getting either your floppy or CD working if you want to run Linux. Maybe you could consider an external floppy drive that connects to the parallel port? That should be a cheap and easy solution. I don't know about the USB stick, but Slackware is good with support for different ways of doing things.

[mur]

Well, I cannot boot from a USB drive in the BIOS, and I think I can borrow a paralel zip drive, would this work?

[drakebasher]

I think I can borrow a paralel zip drive, would this work?

I don't know. I guess it will depend on the Zip drive and on your BIOS. My only experience with my external floppy is with the TI notebook that it came with. The BIOS needs to be setup to "look" for the boot device and that's determined first before the computer is built. If your computer can boot to the Zip, then Slackware is ready with ZipSlack.