Thanks, c123. My BIOS definitely allows booting from USB- BIOS considers it to be another "hard drive", so the boot order is currently:

1. Floppy

2. CDs
a. DVD reader
b. DVD+R/RW

3. HDs
a. USB key, [sda1/FAT32]
b. hda, including C:[hda2/NTFS] and D:[hda1/FAT32](factory recovery partition only)
c. hdb, including G:[hdb1/FAT32], [hdb5/ext2], [hdb6/linux swap]

So the USB is queued up to boot before Windows (C. In fact, I tried to follow the directions for a debian loader with syslinux (d-i.pascal.at), but it didn't work, so I have to take out the USB if I want to boot Windows, or I get a Debian boot error and it kernel panics all over my ass (I've since deleted those files). No doubt it's possible, as the method of doing a pre-version 3.4 USB poor man's is well documented. Problem is that version 3.4 and beyond boots in a different fashion, which is why the boot floppy script now creates 2 boot floppies instead of one, and the old process doesn't work any more (something about 3.4 lacking the boot.img, mkfloppy and rawrite2.exe files on the 3.4 CD, IIRC). I think I read that 3.4 uses isolinux.

jd