CrunchBang Linux

cenzo188

Member

Registered: 2013-01-26

Posts: 40

Booting to a live USB on an old PoS terminal

So, the other day I found an old NCR RealPos 70 1152 point-of-sale terminal in the garbage. It's interesting, has a touchscreen and integrated card reader, and seems to run OK now that I cleared years of dust out of the fan. Not sure what I would use it for but I'd like to experiment with it regardless. It's running some verson of XP, which I can't log in to because it requires login and password. So I was thinking I would install Crunchbang on it.
The problem is, I can't seem to get it to boot to a USB and it doesn't have an optical drive. When it starts up, I see briefly a line that says "auto-detected USB mass storage device". But the only boot devices listed in the BIOS are "IBA FE Slot 0140 v", "1st floppy drive" (the unit doesn't have a floppy drive), and "PM-ST380215A", which is the hard drive.
There are two IDE connectors on the motherboard, one of which is the hard drive, the second of which I assume could be "1st floppy drive". I could get my hands on an IDE floppy drive easily, but of course, a floppy is too small.

Any ideas for how I can boot to an external drive on this thing? Or do I have no option other than to throw it back in the dumpster?