I had a machine that came into my possession for a short time with a broken CD-ROM drive, and it also wouldn't boot from USB. The BIOS date on this machine said October 15, 1999. I had good success booting from a floppy image that I found on http://plop.at/ which also has CD boot images. This image somehow allows booting from USB by inserting it into whatever media will boot and pressing the letter u. My laptop works this way, as I can boot it from a DVD, but not from USB. So I put the CD boot image into the CD-ROM crive, boot it up and press the letter u about 3 seconds after the drive starts spinning. This causes the USD drive with whatever distro I like to boot normally. This is really a godsend, as the DVD drive on most machines is extremely slow, and I currently don't have many writable DVD's or CD's. I couldn't get the latest version to work on this rather old laptop, probably due to a lack of RAM, but I have been able to load Fedora 20 and I believe even 21 using this method. Hope this helps. Sent from the library _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup
