USB booting :: Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader?

I have a tablet PC that can only boot from its internal hard drive, its nonexistent internal IDE CD, or its nonexistent internal floppy connected via an exotic, proprietary cable (resembling the plastic-tape cables used to connect laptop motherboards to TFT displays). It does, however, have Windows XP installed, and has both USB & PCMCIA ports free. I can easily use it to copy files to the drive (I have both USB and PARIDE external CD-rom drives, plus a PCMCIA 2-gig microdrive and a pair of 512mb flash drives... one PCMCIA, one USB)

Assuming I can use Partition Magic to shrink the existing NTFS partition and create new unformatted partitions for /boot (ext-2, /dev/hda2, ~64mb), / (ext-3, /dev/hda3, ~8gb), and swap (/dev/hda4, 256mb), is there any good way to actually install GRUB, create the filesystems, and copy the files from within Windows?

not with XP i don't think.

(say thanks to microsoft !)

what i gather is you don't have the proprietry floppy nor cdrom drive to boot it.
if it was me. i'd try to find a way to remove the hard disk and plug it into another machine where one can do things.

If you are in a network there might be a way (though I have no clue how to do this, I have read about it once)

You could run DSL in qemu, but you couldn't install it (or touch the HD anyway) from there, since it's in its own sandbox...
I think Jasper meant a network PXE boot, would that be possible?

A good solution, but you need another linux machine in your LAN: make the partitions.
get NBD server for windows
start it with
nbdsrvr \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 9000 2
This will share the second partition (hda2) over NBD on port 9000. Check your firewall doesn't block it..

Then on the linux system:
nbd-client <server-ip> 9000 /dev/nd0

now you can format it, i.e. mke2fs /dev/nd0
and also move anything you like to it (after mount of course)

Do this for all the partitions.....

Only remaining thing is the bootloader.

Got it! While your boot partition is exported, you CAN install grub to it! And then use XP's bootloader to chainload grub.
If you need more specific instructions, just ask

*removed double post*

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