how to boot from a usb drive when....

[da_ging]

how to boot from a usb drive when.... the laptop does not support booting from a usb device?

basically ive just got a fairly old celly 366 laptop that im planning on using as a extra folding machine and for downloads etc. now the problems is that the lappy did not come with the hard drive connection cable and it aint a n easy 1 to get hold of so i was planning on using a usb harddrive i just dont know how to actually boot from that drive? loading windows onto it is fine but how do i then get it to boot from it when the lappy doesnt support usb booting, is there and special floppy or cd i can use to load and then boot the usb drive?

[EvilMunky]

there is a way to get usb stuff to work in dos.

i think www.bootdisk.com has a disk thazt contains usb drivers.
Not sure if it will work but it might be worht a shot

[Rave]

A Celly 366 may be marginal for returning folding WUs within the time limit. I'd check if I were you, shame to waste the power running it if your WUs don't actually get accepted.

[directhex]

i wonder if you could chain-load an os using a GRUB floppy

[Zak33]

i wonder if you could chain-load an os using a GRUB floppy

you WHAT? You talkin riddles my man.,....explain pls!

[Steve]

you WHAT? You talkin riddles my man.,....explain pls!

GRUB - GRand Unified Bootloader. It's used by Linux as a bootloader usually, but it lets you boot lots of other things too.

Directhex is wondering if you could install GRUB to a floppy disk, load that, and then find the USB drive and get the system to chainload it (basically, start loading that OS instead.)

He might be onto something, but I still think BIOS support will be key here.