USB booting :: USB Bootimage for HDD?

Hey Gang,

I have been trying -to no avail- to use a hard drive on a laptop strictly to act in the same
fashion as a bootfloppy... to allow a USB stick to be bootable.

Here's the deal... Old laptop: bios has no usb booting support, slow-questionable hard drive,
intermittent CD drive and no floppy. It may also be in places vulnerable to theft so I want the
Hard Drive empty.

I want the hard drive to act strictly as a boot floppy would, only to recognize the
USB stick and boot from it. I have messed around with Grub, and tried to force various
images onto the drive. No Joy. Seems like a simple task for one who knows what they are
doing and in this case, I am certainly not that one.

My Googlagle leads me to believe that I am alone in my quest.

Any Ideas?

What have you done with GRUB that didn't work?

edited

I flailed around ineffectively with GRUB. It has been a while since I gave up on it,
but I tried assigning the root() assignment in GRUB to point to the USB stick,
but I could not determine whether it was not capable of working or I had bad
syntax. I just figured I was barking up the wrong tree.

Are you suggesting that GRUB is the way to go?

What laptop + bios version?

Have you tried lilo?

You can do it like this:

- dd the bootfloppy to the HD. The HD will not be readable, but will be bootable.

Or, grub can do it like this:

- copy the kernel and initrd to the hd. Set grub to boot those, without any reference to the usb stick. It's how the bootfloppy works too, it boots itself, and the initrd finds the usb stick.

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