Nearly every bios supports booting from usb drives. And I've only ever run into one thumb drive that wouldn't boot, and it was because instead of a regular harddrive it emulated an ls120 drive.
You might look into Smart Boot Manager, available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/ - according to the docs (I've not used it, but it looks handy), you boot from a device with it (say a floppy - it is less than 50k), and it enumerates the devices on your computer that can be booted from, not depending on the BIOS. It seems that you should be able to put whatever boot image you want on your thumb drive and boot from that through SBM.
As a matter of fact, at least one of the machines in question has a motherboard old enough to not support booting from USB. :-(
In my house, 1999 is not surprisingly old for a computer, I'm afraid. But I'm somewhat reassured that newer machines coming in are likely to have that feature. It's just the ones in between "stopped putting floppy drive in" and "started booting from USB" that I have to worry about.
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In my house, 1999 is not surprisingly old for a computer, I'm afraid. But I'm somewhat reassured that newer machines coming in are likely to have that feature. It's just the ones in between "stopped putting floppy drive in" and "started booting from USB" that I have to worry about.