I tried this before with all kinds of problems messing with booting a USB drive... Tried the reinstall image offered by HP and it had problems booting the FreeDOS kernel. I got a newer kernel and saw... omg, what the HELL kind of drive geometry is it giving my 512MB usb stick? fdisk did as old freedos kernel did - "Divide by zero" error. It set it as like 4000-ish Cyl, and 1sec/trk..!? So thats why USB booting sucked.. My 8GB one got something a weee more standard but still weird, it would always eventually boot..
So ANYWAY. I tried lots of things, Linux always ran EXCELLENT with syslinux in the MBR (not in the volume boot records tho, of course). Problem is CHS address 0/1/1 on one PC ended up different than on this one, always. So I could mess with partition tables and get stuff working, or ...
DOWNGRADE TO BIOS 1.04 OR OLDER. Reading the release notes, they "increased BIOS compatibility with USB devices" in v1.05. I've not rechecked what my drive is reported as yet, but my 512MB actually booted BartPE ... [note: edit later if this is true or not hah]
So I grabbed the Windows XP Embedded system from a HP t5700-something. Removed the first 0x200 bytes, and it's a NTFS disk image of a 256MB drive. Write to USB flash, and it'll start to boot.
Of course you can see I've great interest and success at booting XP installs from USB when they're not suppose to... but XPe made for a different machine is, wow, tough. The usual registry edits don't do it. It loads the USB drivers, but still the infamous STOP 7B blue screen.
Why? The whole SYSTEM hive is from a t5710 (or whatever it was) and uses different USB controllers is my guess... I tried basically manually changing the USB hardware in the registry to make sure it knew about the t5510's USB stuff... That wasn't enough. I merged the registry from BartPE and the t5710, that didn't work either.. DAMMIT.
Well, if you still want to run XP on your t5510, you can of course. There's a nice popular torrent out there called Micro XP by eXperience that should work fine for you. You'd still have to add EWF filters yourself to fix slow write times if using a USB flash. I imagine it'd run aight. My t5510 has 256MB of RAM. yours might not, not sure if I upgraded it or not.
The CPU is 800MHz, but don't let that confuse you. It's no intel nor desktop chip. USB I believe is super-slow 1.1 (not confirmed, this isn't my only thin client and I get confused). I may be wrong, but a good idea if you can is network booting. use/google gPXE and try booting XP over the LAN from a SAN service (theres free ones for Windows even). Booting over 100Mbps LAN is MUCH better than using USB!! Of course, best solution is a small laptop drive and 44pin IDE cable & velcro it in there haha! :)
Slax runs decent yo. Again, it's kinda heavy on the windows manager so RAM helps here but CPU is aight :)
Was pretty easy grabbing that XP Embedded image out of HP's Softpaq, if only it proved useful somehow... hrm...
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