How to install Puppy without a CD drive?

[admil]

I am such a newbie, I can't even make sense of the Beginners entries in the Forum, so I apologize for my extreme ignorance in advance.
Here's my story: I have a Sony Picturebook PCG-C1VPK w/ Windows ME. It has the best keyboard I ever found on such a small unit, so I want to stay with it. But it runs really slowly.
I thought I might solve this problem by replacing Windows ME with Puppy, assuming Puppy solved the speed problem when I ran it before installing it and removing Windows ME.
Problem is I don't have a CD-Rom drive for the Picturebook. I hoped instead to try and install Puppy via a USB stick. But when I go to the "Control Panel," click on "Sony Notebook Setup" and go to the "Initial Setting" tab, it lists the "Boot Device Sequence" as
1. CD-Rom Drive
2. Diskette Drive
3. Hard Disk Drive.
Does this mean I can neither try nor install Puppy from a USB stick insert in the USB slot in my Picturebook?
Or is there some way to add the USB slot to the "Boot Device Sequence"?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[Jaybekay]

Does this mean I can neither try nor install Puppy from a USB stick insert in the USB slot in my Picturebook?

It looks like that is the case. Fortunately that isn't the only way to use Puppy. You can also boot from CD or install to your hard drive.

Have you looked at Puppylinux.org?

http://www.puppylinux.org/manuals/puppy ... -run-puppy

[rjbrewer]

Admil;

If you have the floppy disc option you can use a floppy to boot
the usb flash drive. Then you can either run it that way or make
a full install to the hard drive from the usb.

The first thing to do would be; make a usb flash drive using the
puppy universal installer on another computer with cdrom
drive. Then make a wake-pup2 floppy on that same computer.
Plug usb flash in sony and set bios to boot from floppy.

If all else fails, it might be possible to pull the hard drive from
Sony and use a laptop-ide adapter to make a full install to the
drive on another computer. Adapters are about 5 dollars on Ebay.

rjb

[admil]

Although I don't have a floppy drive, I can get a hold of Puppy already loaded on a USB flash drive. But I'm inferring that, unless I've connected to the Sony a floppy drive loaded with a wake-pup2 floppy and set the floppy drive as the first option in the Boot Sequence, there's no way to activate the Puppy on the USB flash drive.
Since I suspect pulling the hard drive to install Puppy with an IDE adapter is beyond me, I guess I need to either find, maybe on EBay, where the prices I've seen for these items are sort of annoying, a CD-Rom or Floppy drive if I'm going to load Puppy.
Unless, of course, anyone has any other suggestions, despite my, I'm sure by now, very apparent computer idiocy.

[Stormson5150]

Just an idea that may or may not work for you...

Try connecting the USB before you fire up the machine, then take another look at the hard drive section.... In my old HP lappy USB drives show up under HardDirve in the BIOS...If you try it and you see a plus mark next to the HDD then that means both HDD and USB drives are under it and you need to set the USB to be selected first... For ~me~ thats with the "enter" key to expand the list and then the f5-f6 keys to select which one, but you'll have to consult you're manual to find out about you're BIOS...

If thats a bust then you could try a PXE enabled network card??? I'm not well versed enough in puppy (yet) to try and help you with that, but someone here could I'm sure...