Hello guys, I am sure we all have that one machine that is like 13 years old and its a pain when we have to format the HDD and reinstall our OS and we have to do it with our CD drives.
Few weeks ago i found myself needing to do it but my DVD drive was dead as a post and i had no CDs to write too. So i plugged my HDD in to my dads and installed Debian on it and plugged it in to my other machine. Worked but not so well. It was slow and had graphics issues even after installing a new kernal. Anyways i found a way to make my machine boot from a Flash drive using something called plop and Grub. What this will do is put an entry on your boot loader and at boot select it and grub will forward you to your flash drive. http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux/index.html

I cant remember exactly where on the site the linux section is. Hope some of you find this useful. Good day Nerdlings :)