[123Runner]

Booting from a floppy is always a possibility. The problem is that you would be operating in pure DOS mode. You could copy files that way but it is difficult to do.
A floppy is to small to hold a image of any OS.
The Puppy Linux needs to be booted from the CD. There is no way to get it to work through a USB external. It needs to start and load to memory.

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I ran across this during my research: from plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Run from Floppy with a disk image

A floppy disk image is a file that contains every sector of the floppy disk. You cannot copy the image file on a floppy disk like a common file. It's required to use a special program that writes sector per sector of the image file to the floppy disk sectors. There are many programs available to do this.

Download the current boot manager plpbt-5.0.7.zip. Extract it to get the floppy disk image plpbt.img.

DOS: You can use diskimg.com with diskimg -d a -w plpbt.img

Windows: Write the disk image with the program rawwritewin to the floppy disk

Linux: dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0

You can configure the plpbt.bin on the floppy with plpcfgbt.

What are your thoughts?

Also if I booted from a floppy and then ran puppy on an external USB CD-ROM would that work? Would the desktop recognize the external CD-ROM?

If I do not want to slave the hard drive (since finding another desktop appears to be my current limitation) is my next best choice to buy a CD-ROM (IDE) install it in the hardrive and then proceed with puppy and finally recovery?

Thanks for all of your input and best wishes for a wonderful year.

[hfainman]

I ran across this during my research: from plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Run from Floppy with a disk image

A floppy disk image is a file that contains every sector of the floppy disk. You cannot copy the image file on a floppy disk like a common file. It's required to use a special program that writes sector per sector of the image file to the floppy disk sectors. There are many programs available to do this.

Download the current boot manager plpbt-5.0.7.zip. Extract it to get the floppy disk image plpbt.img.

DOS: You can use diskimg.com with diskimg -d a -w plpbt.img

Windows: Write the disk image with the program rawwritewin to the floppy disk

Linux: dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0

You can configure the plpbt.bin on the floppy with plpcfgbt.

What are your thoughts?

Also if I booted from a floppy and then ran puppy on an external USB CD-ROM would that work? Would the desktop recognize the external CD-ROM?

If I do not want to slave the hard drive (since finding another desktop appears to be my current limitation) is my next best choice to buy a CD-ROM (IDE) install it in the hardrive and then proceed with puppy and finally recovery?

Thanks for all of your input and best wishes for a wonderful year.

[123Runner]

I do not know exactly what that is.
I do know that boot managers allow booting of different OS.

As for booting from a external CD drive, your bios MUST have an option to boot from USB.
Have you checked in your bios for that option?

How to boot from USB