Look at PartedMagic. It's actually a live utility/recovery distro, but it has great tools for mounting USB drives and extensive support for network and graphics cards.
You can also select at boot to copy and run PartedMagic completely from memory. My guess is you could then copy your PB2 files from the USB drive into /opt directory, and also be running PB2 completely from memory! Might be really fast!
Hmmm. How 'bout a PB2 live distro?
LongShot