USB booting, sort of

[thestevo]

I would like to be able to boot knoppix from a USB drive, but not actually have the USB drive be the boot device. In other words I would like to have a floppy or small CD containing whatever necessary to boot just enough to recognize the usb drive and boot the iso off of it. My reasoning behind this is in three parts:

1. I want to be able to boot off of the USB drive on computers that don't have BIOS USB booting support
2. I don't want to go through and modify everything necessary to make linux truly run off of the drive just like a hard drive
3. It would be easier to change distros and version to just replace an ISO

Could I use a specialized GRUB or LILO?

Now, pardon me for asking this if it isn't possible, but I think it is because when you boot knoppix you can boot off of an iso stored anywhere right? If this isn't possible how I am proposing it, I would like any feedback on any other way to do this while keeping my major goals in mind.

Thanks,

Stephen

[marhleet]

I'd expect that a boot floppy would work
with the commands to search the usb hub, mount the usb dev and then boot.
someone will wake up, eventually

[thestevo]

Would anybody know how to go about making such a disk?

[xerces8]

You should extract the boot image from the CD and save it on a floppy.
If the CD uses floppy emulation, then it would be trivial, but I doubt that.

Besides, beware that Knoppix 3.8.1 does not work with USB drives. See bug number 6 on http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bugs/3.8.1

[kphklaus]

Try it with KPHUSB.
to find unter the URL:

http://urd.kph.de/wiki/index.php/Kphusb

Sorry it is german but it is very simple.

KPH