Laptops :: No IO on laptop.

I have an old laptop, which originally had a floppy drive. The floppy drive is broken. It has 2 PC card slots, and a hard drive. There is currently no OS loaded. I have a CF to PCMCIA adapter card, and a 256MB CF card. I also have its hard drive (3 GB), and a USB adapter for it. The computer cannot boot off the hard drive, so is there anyway that I can install DSL on it?
I was thinking if I could somehow copy a bootable (ie Live) OS straight to the hard drive, and then boot up in the laptop. Is this possible? How?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

original here.