Bert, I did create a usb stick that did boot on a machine with no drives present at all--no hard drive, no cd/dvd. That was with luci-265. I made one with an ext4 file system using gparted and Puppy universal Installer and one with a fat32 fs using Bootflash and both booted with no drives present. It was a semi-modern machine with a Gigabyte AM3 motherboard and a Phenom 2 X4.Can someone confirm this is now solved?
I had no luck trying it on a new Atom box, with no internal HDD. Tried all possible bios settings...
Who knows though? It is certainly possible that some machines will and some won't.
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