I'm trying to boot from a usb stick.
I formatted it to fat32, and later to ext2, and installed dsl on it using unetbootin, and later the usb install guide on dsl wiki (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Install_to_USB_From_within_Linux).

The bios doesn't have a setting for booting from usb. Grub doesn't "see" the usb drive when I use the root and find commands, explained in (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/USB_Booting). This happens even when I set boot from floppy at the top of the boot order. However, my usb keyboard is recognised by the bios and by grub. How can it recognise the keyboard but not the usb drive? Also, the usb led does flash even before grub starts up, so surely something must be happening usb-wise?

I am now following an ubuntu guide to booting from a USB stick, using a hdd-based, minimal linux kernel to supply the usb drivers. But I'm having difficulty adapting it to other OSes (slax/dsl/aptosid). I believe I have to alter the initrd.gz file to include usb drivers and then copy that file along with vmlinuz to a partition on my hdd. But, what's the grub command for the kernel line supposed to look like?

From the ubuntu example it's:

title USB FLASH DRIVE
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/usb-boot/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent
initrd /boot/usb-boot/initrd.lz
boot

Should mine just be:

title USB FLASH DRIVE
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/usb-boot/vmlinuz cdrom-detect/try-usb=true
initrd /boot/usb-boot/initrd.lz
boot