I've been doing some work on USB storage support in debian-installer, and it should support booting from USB keys now, almost. The problem is that I do not own any BIOS that can boot directly from my USB keychain. However, I have made the standard d-i boot floppy automatically look for USB devices, and it will load the rest of the installer from such a device. All you need to do is drop a debian CD iso onto a partition on your USB device, and include the hd-media-initrd.gz on there too, named initrd.gz. If you then include the d-i vmlinuz file on there and put on a bootloader set up to use the vmlinux and initrd, it should all just work. The INSTALLATION-HOWTO has more details. So some assembly required right now, it needs to be tested and polished up by someone who can actually test booting from USB devices though. -- see shy jo
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