Live CD Booting

I've been trying to come up with a solution to the failing hard drive problem that haunts the every-day computer user.

The first solution was a bootable USB flash drive. Pretty nice, especially if persistent data storage can be achieved.

I ran into a problem with this solution when I attempted it on an old machine that could not boot USB flash drives. This lead me to the "persistent storage" feature of Knoppix, which allowed me to boot the OS from the CD and then load the data from a flash drive. This worked well, but either I did it wrong, or I misunderstood it, because I can't get the persistent data to persist.

My next adventure led me here where I found that you could make a bootable CD which allowed you to boot from the flash drive.

That is where I am now, hopefully we can see some positive results from this one...