Can I boot from usb flash drive without floppy?

[kabooky]

Ok, so my usb flash drive is bootable because I've booted off of it as a ms-dos boot disk.
I've burned puppy 1.03 to cd and I can boot that up fine too.
I'm running a dell dimension 8400
I use the script on the cd to make my puppy usb flash drive, and I get two choices for which partition i want to select, i get PNY-DIRECT, and the MS-DOS partition.
I've tried them both and when I go to reboot, it looks likes its gonna load because it shows the linux command lines briefly, just as it does off the cd right before the splash screen comes up, but instead of proceeding it just reboots and reboots in a cycle never getting to the splash screen.
I'm not real sure about whether I should be formatting my drive as a FAT or FAT32 filesystem. Ideally I'd like to just plug my usb flash drive in and have it boot right in to linux the way it does off the cd, I'd like to not have to use boot loaders or anything
please help.

[Test]

Hi,

my Dell Latitude D610 behaves the same way. I tried different BIOS settings but it didn't help.

Any ideas?