BIOS problems, booting from external USB on some older computers

[Paul Johnson]

I have external disks and on systems where the BIOS allows one to boot
from USB, I can start Fedora 7 on the external disk.  I've got all the
Grub and other complications with disk labels and so forth worked out.

However...

I have run into a fleet of Dell GX260 systems and the BIOS does not
allow USB to boot.  They do allow a CDROM to boot, however, and so I
started wondering if there is a way I could give users a CDROM that
would start the boot process and then hand over to the external USB
system.  I don't want the rescue disk, really, because that asks the
users questions and requires them to interact as root with the system.
 But some thing like that would be good..

Do you have any advice?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas