OK Larry. I knew I could use the same technique as creating a bootable CD for creating a bootable USB stick, but DOS won't do it and the Linux partition isn't on this PC. Surely you aren't telling me I can boot into DOS and THEN those files will run? I'll try it, but I am betting quite a lot of beers it won't work!
Forget that. I hope this isn't my mistake but maybe my misunderstanding. Both 0.3.4-1 and 0.3.4-2 now get started so it was a video problem.
I tried the other video options and i810 and Intel got error messages - but ABOVe the error message it showed that it was correctly identifying the Video card and using the correct generic monitor ID. So I have no idea why "default" start didn't work. I had assumed the default was VESA but assuming is usually a mistake.
vesa worked for both versions.
A couple of points you might like to consider for future versions:
1. This is the only bootable CD I have made which does NOT offer the option to boot from CD/DVD as the "other" option - the default being to boot from hard disk. Could you include that in a future version? It saves pulling the CD every time between uses!
2. If a user arrives at the error messages as I did, he gets
gparted ~ #
Now I am assuming that is the command prompt but not everyone will know if they are used to ONLY seeing something like:
c:\
Not a big deal, but if you want them to do something after that (like "quit" for instance lol), it would be useful to have something telling them what to do.
3. Again from the command prompt, of course I tried "help" which was great EXCEPT that it scrolled off the top of the screen so the first (important) lines of help are missing. Now a DOS user might now about "/p" or "more" - what does a Linux user know? Just a thought because Pause doesn't work at the speed this thing goes and I have a feeling this is where your GNU Bash is mentioned.
Anyway, now that I can start, back to the 0.3.4-2 version and actually do some testing! Already I notice that it is incredibly slow compared, say, to something like RPM which INSTANTLY comes up with the partition/MBR information on all hard disks and USB drives with no discernible delay. Of course, that is a text only interface, but your "scanning" takes a long time. Any reason for this that I don't know about? Is that normal? Every other linux application I ever tried even beat DOS.