USB booting :: How to boot other OSes?

I'm having some problems installing a debian style OS to my USB hardisk (as per the instructions). DSL always hangs when copying the files to the root directory. I told cfdisk to create a 300MB partition for me.

However, at the boot prompt I discovered that "dsl tohd=/dev/sda7" allows me to subsequently "dsl bootfrom=/dev/sda7". Much to my dismay, the file "hello" did not survive the reboot! When I boot from sda7, where is /home/dsl? Is it in a ramdisk?

/dev/sda is a 300GB USB hard disk drive (HDD) with lots of partitions.

My computer has a braindammaged BIOS that normally won't boot from a USB device.

Can I use the floppy or the CD to boot other USB HDD resident OSes besides DSL? I was told I could. I would love to boot SuSE 10.2, Fedora 6, Windows XP 2003 Server and Ubuntu 6.06. Is this possible?

Thanks,
Siegfried

original here.