ubuntu 9.10 on dell inspiron 8100

Bios doesn't accept boot from usb. The cdrom laser is fried but the dvd laser works. Yup read about this that the two are different. Floppy drive works but barely.

After searching for a few days here's the easiest way that I found to do this.

Use plop boot manager

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

• write this to a floppy disk as an image using rawrite
• boot to floppy and once plop loaks choose usb WITHOUT the usb drive in. It will say that it hasn't found anything in the usb slot.
• insert the usb drive with ubuntu iso on it hit esc and choose boot from usb again and then it should work. At least it did for me.