Faulty BIOS or GRUB issue (USB Stick won't boot)

[Daniel Mierswa]

Hey list,
in January this year I got my hands dirty with a laptop and tried 
booting it via USB stick. The thing is that, when installed to the MBR 
of the stick, the BIOS just won't detect it and print "Operating system 
not found" and skips to reading the MBR from HDD. If I install it into 
the active boot partition of the stick, it will show me the "GRUB " 
notification_string (boot/i386/pc/boot.S). I'm currently booting this 
stick via syslinux which then loads a GRUB image I created with 
lnxboot.img. However I find this very impractical, as I need to find the 
UUID of the stick (which GRUB then sees as fd0) and load a configuration 
which itself loads the real GRUB configuration. I received quite a few 
help during that time of year by Robert and daChaac via IRC, and I also 
posted this on help-grub@ but got no answer there. I bring this up 
again, because someone else faced the same issue with another USB stick 
(until that point I seemed to be the only one facing it). I "debug"ed as 
good as I could by putting the output of the notification string in the 
boot.S file to several places and reboot. It comes to the point where it 
executes `jmp *(kernel_address)`.
If anyone has any idea how to go on with this issue, I'd welcome it.
Thanks in advance.

--
Mierswa, Daniel

If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply 
know better than you do.
               --- Linus Torvalds, comp.os.linux.advocacy, 1996/07/22