usbinstall -> unbootable stick

[tclfan]

Perhaps not worth of your time, which is precious for TinyCore development, but eventually it would be interesting to dig to the bottom of this and find out what is responsible for not booting in Zip emulation after TC usbinstall...
Just as roberts precisely explained, as much as we have standard for CD booting, there is no standard at all for usb booting and depending on BIOS and usb stick it can behave wildly different... This is a pity, because usb is common nowadays but manufacturers never came together to set ground rules...

[bmarkus]

Perhaps not worth of your time, which is precious for TinyCore development, but eventually it would be interesting to dig to the bottom of this and find out what is responsible for not booting in Zip emulation after TC usbinstall...
Just as roberts precisely explained, as much as we have standard for CD booting, there is no standard at all for usb booting and depending on BIOS and usb stick it can behave wildly different... This is a pity, because usb is common nowadays but manufacturers never came together to set ground rules...

To be honest I haven't seen such variations in USB boot. Machines around me booted from USB without any issue. There were many different machines including ...books like Asus, Acer, IBM, Lenovo, Dell, ... as well as desktop machines with different BIOS and from different vendors, like MSI, ASUS, GIGABYTE, ...

My long time favorite for years, SLAX booted always fine from USB stick configured with its own WINDOWS or LINUX installation tool.

Or in case of old machines it was not possible to boot at all.

[tclfan]

To narrow down the source of the problem: Was it booting after default usbinstall in Zip emulation, using TC 2.3? Default - I mean letting usbinstall format the second partition as Fat32, without subsequent change to Ext3?
And yes, the outcome of booting a usb stick may look the same, but interraction of BIOS is key. That is why roberts provided several different emulations in usbinstall to use...

[Lee]

...Bmarkus, Lee:
Normally when you buy a usb stick it comes as removeable media. Hardware of the usb stick allows to set this media to be as removeable or look like a hard disk drive. You can use a utility...

Lexar, Lexmark - what's in a name. 

Seriously, thanks for this tip.  I have a handfull of halg-gig lexar fireflies that I got from K-mart mega cheap on clearance (a good many months ago).  It turns out that my USB 1.0 computer (Asus A7-V mobo running Windows XP) won't recognize these things -at all- but the same box running tc had no problems with them (I don't remember if I tried booting from them).  I wonder now if I could use this trick to allow that box to access these usb sticks (its the only Windows box I plan on keeping around).

[tclfan]

Seriously, thanks for this tip.  I have a handfull of halg-gig lexar fireflies that I got from K-mart mega cheap on clearance (a good many months ago).  It turns out that my USB 1.0 computer (Asus A7-V mobo running Windows XP) won't recognize these things -at all- but the same box running tc had no problems with them (I don't remember if I tried booting from them).  I wonder now if I could use this trick to allow that box to access these usb sticks (its the only Windows box I plan on keeping around).

They look perfect for TC...
You can flip them into HDD emulation mode and see if it helps.
Recently I found an informative article on the Internet, where the author was claiming PCs have the best chance of booting to usb stick if the stick is in HDD emulation.  Since some sticks (from my experience 50/50) sticks cannot be flipped to HDD emulation (at least there is no utility available to do it), the author was recommending tricking usb stick to resemble HDD emulation by partitioning it into at least two partitions. Some BIOSs when they see two partitions, they think it is not removeable media but HDD and they boot.
In any case, those usb sticks that can be turned into HDD mode are far more valuable to users like me so when I buy one and test one to be such I go back and buy several of them. Their HDD capabilities go way beyond just booting. It is also other advantages, such as all partitions can be recognized by Windows and treated as hard disks.

[curaga]

You can test if it's a BIOS issue or not by booting the stick with Qemu:

qemu -hda /dev/sda

[jls]

You can test if it's a BIOS issue or not by booting the stick with Qemu:

qemu -hda /dev/sda

maybe qemu -usb -hda /dev/sda