Installing DSL on a computer without CD-ROM

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Installing DSL on a computer without CD-ROM
started by: Ingen

Posted by Ingen on Feb. 12 2006,18:47

Well, essentially, I have a laptop with a floppy drive. It has a CD-rom but it's broken, so of little use. It also has a USB port, but windows 95a and DOS are not really interested in acknowledging it.

It has a network PCMCIA card, but I'm unsure if it's working. I want to put DSL on this piece of.. this laptop. The laptop is 233 mhz with 64 mb ram. I've set up a ~700 mb linux ext 2 and a ~300 linux swap, using partition magic 8.

Can I move some form of image to the harddrive and boot from a floppy and have it install from the image? Also, would it let me decide when booting which operating system to use?

I've looked around, but it seems most harddrive installations assume the computer has a working network connection or cd-rom.

How do I get through this?

Posted by larkl on Feb. 12 2006,20:05

You should do a search on "poorman" install or "floppy only" install. I haven't done it, but lots of posts and some WIKI about it.

Posted by Ingen on Feb. 12 2006,22:29

I did, followed instructions, and it started. However, once in it, it couldn't find any partitions, so I couldn't install it to harddrive. After rebooting, computer could no longer find any operating system. So, it didn't exactly turn out to be a success.

Posted by cbagger01 on Feb. 13 2006,18:01

Try booting with:

dsl frugal

boot command.

Posted by Ingen on Feb. 15 2006,18:29

I might to later, don't have the time to move the image file to my laptop by floppy again (I only have a few floppies, making it very slow :P) at the moment. I'll try to find time to do it though. Thanks for the advice.

Posted by harasho on Feb. 20 2006,11:48

Face dwith a similar situation, I pulled my HD from a laptop, attached an adaptor, and loaded D.S.L. on it from a computer w/ a bootable CDROM drive. Worked fine when reinstalled to the laptop.

Harasho