1. The thread relates to early stage newbs getting a USB Flash Drive working; in this case with little or no internet for extensions.
2. This response is a quickie class to help them get through it, without posting the same question; HOW DOES A NEWB BOOT TC QUICKLY, EVEN IF a,b,c LIMITATIONS APPLY?"
Hopefully this reduces questions about that.
1. Format the USB Flash Drive Fat 32 - later you can play with various EXT file systems.
If you don't have this from the start, you will have issues going back and forth with your other "old box" to adjust things.
When formatting, make sure you make it bootable. You may need a utility to handle this; Linux has fdisk - easy/simple - but you may be operating in Windows.
Note: folders are almost always lowercase unless otherwise shown, though CAPS are used to highlight key words below.
2. Make a TCE folder and in that, make an OPTIONAL folder, or E:\tce\optional, and a boot folder or E:\tce\boot
This structure isn't quite standard, but if you have multiple versions of TCE it can be handy later and keeps everything in one folder - under TCE.
3. Mount the ISO. If you need help with that, find a tutorial on mounting an ISO.
4. Copy the files in the ISO BOOT folder into the E:\tce\boot folder..
5. Also, copy onboot.lst and other files from the ISO CDE folder to the E:\tce folder.
6. Copy the files in the ISO CDE/OPTIONAL folder to the E:\tce\optional folder
7. Grub4Dos is more reliable than syslinux - get it and run it to make your USB bootable, then copy the file grldr to E:grldr
8. Create a file E:\menu.lst with these lines.
(don't add the === lines)
========================
timeout=5
default=0
title BOOT NEWER TINY CORE LINUX
find --set-root /tce/boot/vmlinuz
kernel /tce/boot/vmlinuz quiet waitusb=10 norestore xvesa=1024x768x32
initrd /tce/boot/tinycore.gz
title BOOT OLDER TINY CORE LINUX
find --set-root /tce/boot/bzImage
kernel /tce/boot/bzImage quiet waitusb=10 norestore xvesa=1024x768x32
initrd /tce/boot/tinycore.gz
===========================
9. Make sure your .gz files in the boot folders have these names
OR change the names in the menu.lst file to match what's in the boot folder.
Simple.
10. Don't forget when you boot from USB you have to press F2 or DEL to set up your BIOS to boot the USB first. Otherwise your system will keep trying to go to whatever operating system is on your hard drive.
11. TEST IT: If you've got a FAT32 USB and your boot record is good and your menu.lst and grldr are good, and your folders have the right files in them, you will get a basic TC boot.
If it stalls while booting grub4dos, there's probably a file missing or misnamed in the E:\tce\boot folder or you misspelled E:\tce\optional or you forgot the E:\tce\onboot.lst file. TC is so simple, its almost certainly one of these 3 problems.
...or when you formatted it to make it bootable, or you used grub4dos it failed - which can also happen sometimes, depending on your system.