Issues Booting From a USB CBM Flash drive.. tried many ways

[sgtmattbaker]

first I just formatted the drive as FAT and then used puppy univesal installer with all default settings and installed in superfloppy mode. The USB was completely ignored during boot even through it showed up as the first device in my BIOS. Then I formatted it into 2 partitions 1 45MB one and one 15MB one. the 1st was a FAT32 and the 2nd was an ext2. I did the default in the install but this time I did the do not do as superfloppy. Same thing. Then I formatted the drive completely as FAT16 using gparted and then set a boot flag on the partition then installed using the mbr.bin boot thing. Same thing. Please help. do you think it is my USB drive, my BIOS, some configuration settings in puppy files or something else? please help this is getting frustrating.

[muggins]

did you try using the wakepup floppy?

just a quick google for "usb boot" will bring up heaps of queries from people having problems with this. do you know if your bios definitely supports usb boot? if you're not sure of this check with the computer's support page.

peter anvin, on his syslinux page, http://syslinux.zytor.com/hardware.php

says:

A fair number of BIOSes seem to have problems booting from USB devices. You may have different luck in "USB-HDD", "HDD-ZIP", and "HDD-FDD" mode (in order of preference.)