Installation troubles - not anymore!

I'm trying to install VectorLinux Light onto my laptop, which does not have an internal CD-ROM or Floppy drive. Boot priority options in the BIOS does not allow booting from USB, as far as I can tell. This is a Toshiba Portege R150 that I'm using. I do have a USB DVD drive, but it doesn't seem to be able to detect it before booting into Windows (and I don't know how to make it detectable before that).

I've tried following the direct ISO on Windows section in the installation guide, but it uses loadlin and requires that I be able to use 'real' DOS, but I'm running XP. I've also tried GRUB and UNetbootin, and while GRUB lets me boot into the installer, it says it can't find the ISO file or the veclinux directory on my hard drive (or CD, but I wasn't using a CD). I put the ISO file into C:\, though. I get an "Error 13: Invalid or unsupported executable format" when I try UNetbootin.

I partitioned my hard drive, added a swap partition, an ext3 partition, and sometimes another ext3 partition in case having or not having 4 partitions changes anything.

What am I doing wrong?

Edit: Okay, I got it to start installing. Those errors were because I had everything on the NTFS partition. Silly me.
But now my screen went black because I guess it didn't get me the right driver? Just right after it told me to pick screen resolution. Not sure what to do at this point.

Edit2: Through my mashing the ESC key and Alt+Ctrl+Del buttons, with the occasional 'C', I somehow managed to get through the installer after forcefully shutting down my laptop. It's so pretty <3