I have an older computer that wasn't very friendly to installs - the components are listed below. What I ended up doing is taking the hard drive out of the old fart, putting it into a newer (only 2 yrs old), and running a Slackware install to save space. I hope to put the drive back into the original setup (below) and try to make it work. Question is, is this a viable option? Are there better options?

Western Digital Caviar 2.5gb IDE
Plextor PX-6XCS SCSI CD-ROM (no drivers to boot to CD-ROM)
3 Com Etherlink III ISA
AOPEN AP5T (?) mboard
P166, 64mb ram
ATI Mach64 vid card

Thanks in advance
Andrew

i'm not sure i understand what you are asking.... what is it that you want to know? there are alot of distrobutions that are extremly small, even some that run totally from a ramdisk. your trying to put the old harddrive back into the comp and install linux on it? is that what your saying? if so , there should be no problem at all with installing from some floppies if you can't boot from a cdrom.

Sorry about that. I took the hard drive from the junky old computer (specs listed above) and put it into a capable system that handily booted from CD-ROM. I loaded Linux and am in the process of returning that hard drive to the junky old system.
Is my plan destined for failure? Also, if I load an ultra-small install from floppies, would that give me enough networking capability to add to it?

Wow, it actually booted up... Windows never woulda done this.

so, it worked?
if you load linux from floppies you would have networking capabilties just fine

Yeah, I can't believe it. I tried it out because I had no better solution. Hey do you have a resource or link I can look into if I want to load it from floppies in the future?

look at linux.org they have a nice little search that can find almost any type of distro you'd look for.

Thanks again!