Has any one had success booting Linux from USB devices?  If so, which
boot loader and Linux distribution?

Puppy Linux <http:www.goosee.com/puppy/> seems to have support for
booting from USB flash or pen drive.  I've tried a few machines whose
BIOS supports USB device booting, but no luck so far.

Puppy Linux 0.8.5 (released April 20th) uses syslinux to boot from
flash.  When booting it displays the single line

SYSLINUX 2.08 2003-12-12 

and hangs at that point.  There is no indication that either the
kernel or initrd even started to load.

flash-puppy install simply removes all files from a flash device
(FAT16) and copies the kernel (vmlinuz) and initrd (image.gz -
entire distribution as a loop mounted ext2 filesystem in RAM).

syslinux.cfg:

default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
append ramdisk_size=55296 PSLEEP=25 PHOME=sda1 PROOTFS=umsdos PKEYS=us

PSLEEP, PHOME, PROOTFS and PKEYS are supposed to be passed to the
kernel.

I suspect that syslinux doesn't support all USB devices or perhaps
there's something wrong with the syslinux.cfg.  Any suggestions?

I'm thinking about using a different boot loader to boot Puppy Linux
from USB flash.  Any suggestions?  (I've heard that Puppy Linux 0.8.4 
uses grub for booting from USB flash.)

Sincerely,

Ken Fuchs <kfuchs at winternet.com>

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