HD install - no CD, no USB, no network

Forum: HD Install
Topic: HD install - no CD, no USB, no network
started by: ssens

Posted by ssens on Aug. 11 2006,15:07

This forum provided a lot of great info, and I hope this will help someone. I wish I had documented my effort better, but never really expected it would work.

I own an HP omnibook 2000cs notebook with 16M of RAM, no USB ports, no CD drive (lost it!). I also have a netgear MA401wireless card, but that's just a side note, it did not come into play until after the installation was complete.

I did not want to bother with a floppy-only install - i could only find 3 of them, and 2 were faulty - and saw somewhere on this forum a suggestion to make a HD install with the HD connected to a different computer (ie one with CD drive).

I first purchased a $20 USB enclosure for notebook drives (2.5") and that proved to be a bust, in many ways ... first, i didn't seem to be able to do a HD install on a USB drive. I was able to do a USB-HDD install, but when moving the HD back into the notebook, it booted up ... and nothing. Errors all over the screen. Finally, it fried the USB ports on my desktop. It's one of these enclosures that use one USB port for data and one for power. Could be defective, I don't know. I now use it without power and it works just fine with only the data cable ... but as soon as I plug in the power, it literally shuts down my work Thinkpad on contact ... so that was the end of the USB install experiment.

Finally, I tracked down a 2.5 to 3.5 HD adapter ($10). It was my initial intention, before I realized how hard they were to find in my area, and before I got sold on the idea of the USB enclosure ...

Anyway, I connected the laptop HD into my desktop, created the partitions, and did a full HD install from the system menu. Back into the laptop. Struggled for a while with the resolution, struggled with an unrecognized PCMCIA network card which I quickly gave up on. Also uncountered error messages about modules somewhere being more recent than modules somewhere ... %#&*! But I found instructions on forums about resolving it.

Bottom line, everything is now working (wireless LAN, trackpoint, screen resolution, etc), and I am quite new to linux and DSL, so that route is definitely a viable option. But better yet, don't lose the freakin' CD drive.

Posted by awdark on Aug. 16 2006,03:29

So USB->IDE was no good?

The idea I had was to copy the setup files into the drive and try to run it. (well that was my plan to try to install win2k that way)

I ended up installing DSL on my thinkpad and plugging it into my driveless laptop to use it.