What I want to do is connect a USB flash drive to my computer and have it boot from it. I can do this from an external USB Hard Disk Drive but I fail with a flash drive. Is it me or is it the computer?
My laptop does not have an inbuilt floppy drive and I do not want to boot up with a floppy, cd or internal hard drive and then transfer control to the flash drive. Most searches here refer to that as booting from a USB drive but I think that is wrong and confusing unless I am even thicker than I first thought.
So what do I need to do apart from format a USB flash drive and set the boot flag on it?
I have tried the Puppy Universal installer. I have tried doing something like:
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# dd if=mbrfat.bin of=/dev/sda
# mkdosfs /dev/sda1
# syslinux /dev/sda1
I have also tried installing Grub and Grub4dos.
This is the result of the disktype command:
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--- /dev/sda
Block device, size 3.770 GiB (4047503360 bytes)
GRUB boot loader, compat version 3.2, boot drive 0xff
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 3.766 GiB (4043309056 bytes, 7897088 sectors from 8192, bootable)
Type 0x0B (FAT32 (CHS))
FAT32 file system (hints score 4 of 5)
Volume size 3.758 GiB (4035407872 bytes, 985207 clusters of 4 KiB)
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#features
but I can't figure out how to install it and I am confused about whether it actually means boot from USB or not.
Please help explain this to me before the rest of my hair falls out.