USB booting :: Boot From USB with no Floppy Drive

I have an old laptop that I cannot get to run linux. First off, both the CD and the Floppy Drives are broken, or not working. And second of all, this machine will not recognize my Iomega Mini USB 1.1 256 drive as a startup disk in the BIOS. However it will read this disk in Windows ME. I want to somehow be able to boot up from the USB drive, without using the floppy disk. How can I do this?

Please help,
Mur

buy alaptop hard drive adapter for 5 bucks and connect the laptop hd to the primary master ide cable on adesktop pc
then install dsl as afrugal install.
then put hd back into laptop and copy knoppix folder to your usb drive or do usb pendrive install
then add fromhd=/dev/sda1
to your lilo append line and rerun lilo
finally, reboot with usb drive attached and it will start with laptop hd bootloader and then boot from usb frugal compressed filesystem.

Thank you, This helps, but I only understand the first 3 lines. Is there anyway to just somehow get DSL onto the laptop.

Yes.

Just do the first 3 lines.

The rest is only needed if you want to run DSL from your USB drive. If you only do the first 3 lines, then you can run DSL from the hard drive.

original here.