[mdlug] Alienware doesn't support boot from CD?

[Jay P Hailey]

The USB stick was formatted NTFS.  The 500 Gb external hard drive is 
formatted fat32 (I think)  and both behaved that way.

> Is this USB HD formatted NTFS? I'm not sure about vfat, but ntfs volumes
> will be marked as "dirty" (i.e. not cleanly unmounted and thus not
> necessarily consistent) if they are not properly unmounted.
>
> The ntfs drivers under linux will refuse to mount ntfs filesystems with
> this flag set. *But* you can, if you have root privileges, mount the
> drive manually using the '-f' flag ('f' is for force).
>
> See the man page for 'mount' for more information.
>
> Raymond McLaughlin