Been playing around this week with getting a small distro of linux onto a usb stick in order to carry out quick and dirty admin tasks on a broken installed server. Came across a lot of different options/recommendations but by far the one that I found easiest to set up and use is "Damn Small Linux" also known as DSL -
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org. It's neat coz you just the the computer bios to boot from USB and voila! You have a fully functional linux running (just like from a LiveCD)
Anybody else out there whose played around with USB stick distros? I saw some pretty neat ones specifically designed for carrying out security operations like Penetration tests, vulnerability checks, etc...