Booting recovery images from USB

So, I'm still trying to figure out the Fedora boot, but in the meantime, I tried to figure out how to boot from a few recovery systems.

First off, let's try Parted Magic. This one is pretty simple since they provide a "USB" version. If you extract that, you'll find a boot and a pmagic folder. Copy the pmagic folder to the USB drive. In boot/grub/grub.lst, you'll find a whole bunch of boot options. I only chose the default and failsafe versions for my USB, but some of the others might be useful for you. For GRUB2, however, it'll look a little different:

menuentry "Parted Magic (Default)" {
    linux /pmagic/bzImage edd=off noapic load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 \
        rw vga=791 loglevel=0 max_loop=256 keymap=us
    initrd /pmagic/initramfs
}

menuentry "Parted Magic (Failsafe)" {
    linux /pmagic/bzImage edd=off acpi=off noapic load_ramdisk=1 \
        prompt_ramdisk=0 rw vga=normal nolapic nopcmcia noscsi nogpm \
        consoleboot nosmart keymap=us nosshd nosound max_loop=256
    initrd /pmagic/initramfs
}

Second, you'll probably want memtest. The memtest page has a "Pre-Compiled Bootable Binary" which works just fine. You can also find memtest in the PartedMagic package. Whichever one you choose, it can just be placed directly on the USB drive. The line in GRUB2 is not exactly the same for memtest since it's 16-bit:

menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" {
    linux16 /memtest86+.bin
}