Why I can't recommend Arch or Gentoo

[Kyle]

I had a machine that came into my possession for a short time with a
broken CD-ROM drive, and it also wouldn't boot from USB. The BIOS date
on this machine said October 15, 1999. I had good success booting from
a floppy image that I found on
http://plop.at/
which also has CD boot images. This image somehow allows booting from
USB by inserting it into whatever media will boot and pressing the
letter u. My laptop works this way, as I can boot it from a DVD, but
not from USB. So I put the CD boot image into the CD-ROM crive, boot it
up and press the letter u about 3 seconds after the drive starts
spinning. This causes the USD drive with whatever distro I like to boot
normally. This is really a godsend, as the DVD drive on most machines
is extremely slow, and I currently don't have many writable DVD's or
CD's. I couldn't get the latest version to work on this rather old
laptop, probably due to a lack of RAM, but I have been able to load
Fedora 20 and I believe even 21 using this method. Hope this helps.
Sent from the library