somewhat off-topic - booting from USB drive

[gabrielle harrison and Paul van den Bergen]

Hi All,

I'm trying to diagnose a pair of mostly dead PCs - celeron 700 or there  
abouts.

In particular I'm having trouble booting from CD - CDdrive rarely  
recognised. Will boot from HDD - sometimes.

I was planning to boot from a USB drive - intending to boot either Ubuntu  
live or the UBCD toolkit - but just copying the CD contents doesn't seem  
to be enough... any hints welcome.


-- 
Chance favours the prepared mind