USB booting :: Hard drive formatted...

I installed DSL on my usb drive, then I went to the bios to boot from usb-zip when I rebooted, it tried to boot from the usb drive and the screen stayed black. So I remembered someone posted that if it did something like that then you should press ctrl+alt+delete, or hold down the power button for 10 seconds, so I did that twice because it happened that many times. So I gave up, so I took out the usb drive and I thought it would boot windows 2000, it didn't. So I thought I didn't set to boot from hard drive, so I look, it is set to boot from hard drive. So I take out the windows 2000 system disk to repair it, until I figured out it cant and it has been reformatted. So I chose to install windows again. So after these events, I can say that I might not install linux for some time. It's also kind of ironic because I have to use a Fedora computer to post this because of this...

My guess is that you did not type in the correct device name during the USBZIP install process and you formatted your hard drive instead of your USB drive.

Usually, the USB drive's device name is "sda", but that is not always true. Sometimes your hard drive's device name is "sda".

You can find your USB drive's device name by inserting it and type:

dmesg | grep scsi -A 3

inside a DSL terminal window.

original here.