Hello all,

I have been searching for an answer to this question off and on for
about a month. I have a dual boot system set up with Vista and
Ubuntu. Everything is working great, relearning linux after getting
away from it for a few years. Anyway, on my old computer that I had
set up a few years ago to dual boot (XP and RedHat) I was able to set
it up so it would only boot into linux if I put in a floppy.

I now have Grub set up with Vista first so when my son starts up the
computer, he can go into Vista and use his account. The problem is
when I'm using linux, if I restart the computer and get distracted, I
have to wait for Vista to load before I can restart again and load
linux.

I have found that I can boot and run Ubuntu from a flash drive, but
I'm not finding anything on JUST booting from the flash and using the
copy of linux on the hard drive. I can also boot from the CD, but
again run into the problem of not being able to use the copy I
installed and customized on the hard drive.

I have over 500GB between the two hard drives on my system and I
really don't want to buy a 2GB flash drive to run linux. Is it even
possible to set it up to only boot linux when the flash drive is in?
I would really appreciate any advice or help I could get with this. I
have done multiple google searches and I just can't seem to find what
I'm looking for.