Hard drive install (upgrade) from USB drive?

[Wil Cooley]

On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:37:08 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
 
> The above assumes that you already have linux booting from grub on the
> machine. I've been too lazy to try this myself, but I'd like to know if
> it will work using 2 USB devices - one small flash key type, one large
> enough to hold the iso/dvd images, perhaps for several different
> versions or distributions (the laptop drive based versions are available
> in sizes over 100gigs now and run from USB power).

Note that, theoretically, you could also install grub or syslinux on the
MBR of the large USB drive and boot from it, obviating the smaller drive.
Assuming, of course, you can get the installer to recognize the USB drive
at all :\  I have not taken that course because I am hesitant to go
mucking about with the MBR of my USB drive (I don't know why, other than
that it has all of my music on it also) and I want to find out if it will
work the way I am trying to do it, because that way is only useful if
you have BIOS that can boot from USB.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if it the only tested configurations
are those where the system did boot from the USB drive?  The difference
being what remapping the BIOS does of drive tables.

Wil