[PLUG] Older laptop, booting from DVD, then loading from USB flash drive- upgrading Mint

[Matt McKenzie]

Hey all.
I have tried a bit of Google-fu but so far just getting articles about
booting from either DVD or USB.
In my case I kind of want to do both.

My laptop is an older beast, Pentium M 32bit aka Centrino.  It is a
whitebox unit made by Compal (not Compaq), model CL50, I have had it for
many years and it runs Linux well.
Only real problem with it, it cannot boot from USB.  I have checked for
updates to BIOS, it has the latest that was available for this motherboard.

I have Linux Mint 13 on it, and want to do a fresh install of Mint 14.  I
have Mint 14 image on a USB drive, and the Mint 13 live DVD.
I was hoping to find a way to boot the live DVD, then tell it to continue
loading from the flash drive, so I can install.  This would save having to
burn more DVDs for each upgrade.
I tried fiddling with the options the live DVD has, it does have an option
to boot local disk, but that means hard drive.
I would like to boot from USB flash drive.  The syntax it uses is
unfamiliar, I don't know if it is newer GRUB or it isn't GRUB at all.

If possible I could use a SuperGRUB boot CD (pretty sure I have one, if not
I could of course burn that).  I just want to try to get off the treadmill
of burning new DVDs for each release.

If anyone has actually done this sort of thing I would appreciate pointers,
otherwise I'll just keep digging probably in GRUB or Mint forums etc.
Thanks.

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Matt M.
LinuxKnight