Booting Linux From USB/CD if your BIOS doesn’t support it

Sometimes, everything in Linux is not as cut and dry as we might want it to be. Take booting from a USB thumbdrive for instance. For those that have never done this before, it can be annoying to fumble around with, much as Taran from the Linux Gazette discovered. Luckily he found the article from Barry Kauler that covers this issue. Now things are peach-keen in his universe once again.

The Lockergnome’s Linux Fanatics entry on Puppy Linux caught my eye, and I ended up checking out the Puppy Linux distribution.

Yo Quiero Puppy Linux

This download was fast, and is of course Distrowatch says it is. And as I played with it, I remembered a conversation at LinuxWorld regarding live distributions… and the problem of some BIOS not being able to boot from CD or USB device.

It looks like Barry Kauler came up with a solution.

Boot The Unbootable With the Bootable

Barry Kauler’s article, My PC can’t boot from USB|CD, looks like a really workable solution that can bring Live CDs and Live USB device distributions to the machines that don’t support booting from these devices in the BIOS. Basically, booting from a floppy and pointing to the device that is to be ‘booted’ from.

Another tool in the Linux arsenal.