What's some exotic configurations you've ran into and what's the best move you've come up with that allowed you to get Linux in? Did it stop you?

My best so far is an older laptop that I have no floppy for and the CD isn't bootable. I got around this by carrying the laptop's hard disk to another computer, installing Linux, and then carried the disk back to the laptop and configured it. Works decently well.

If there's a way to prepare the hard disk bootable so that I can put it in the system and then install from the CD on my intended hardware (maybe destroying this temporary boot state in the process) would rock. How would that be done?