HOW TO BOOT PC BY USB DRIVE

Most modern PCs support booting from a USB drive. If not already configured, it is a matter of invoking the BIOS setup when the PC first powers-up. Most often this is done by pressing the DEL key, but some PCs require a function key to be pressed, such as F2. Then, what is called the "boot order" can be setup, and you would typically set CD drive first then hard drive, or you can include a USB drive or floppy drive in the boot-check sequence.

In the BIOS setup you may find some choices for different types of USB drives, such as "USB ZIP", "USB FLOPPY" and "USB HDD" -- the letters "HDD" mean "Hard Disk Drive". A pen drive will usually work with the "USB ZIP" setting, but it depends on the BIOS and you may have to choose "USB HDD".

If you have an older PC that cannot boot from USB, or you have an odd pen drive that the BIOS doesn't recognise (it happens!), there is a fall-back. This fall-back applies also to PCs that cannot boot from a CD drive. This is to use a boot floppy. Puppy has something especially for this situation, called WakePup, developed by Puppy enthusiast "pakt" -- look in the "Setup" menu and you will see an entry "WakePup create boot floppy". This will create a floppy disk that your PC can boot from. The WakePup floppy disk scans the PC and finds Puppy on a USB drive, hard drive, or CD/DVD drive.

Note however, as it is a DOS-based system WakePup can only recognise ISO9660, FAT and NTFS filesystems. CDs use the ISO9660 filesystem for holding files, so that is okay. USB pen drives are usually formatted with FAT16 filesystem, so that is also okay. MSDOS and Windows 95/98 installations are in hard drive partitions with FAT filesystems, so again okay.