i have a laptop with no floppy drive (it broke) and the system doesnt boot from cd mostly cuz the bios is real old and i cant update it cuz no floppy.

so then unfortunatly it has 98 on it right now and i want to put debian or another light linux distro on it. I hope to use it mainly just to toy with as the laptop is a p2 300mhz and its fallen a few times.

If anyone here knows of a way to install linux by either msdos or

I downloaded 11.2.3.1.3 Linux boot loader for MS-DOS: from
h***://debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-appendix#s-file-descs

but it seems like its more of a hardware configuration utility...

if someone knows how to use for what i need could you please help me with it cuz i am a to this

in any case if someone can help me install linux without being able to boot from cd or floppy plz let me know i can do a network install but i cant boot from a floppy so umm yah....

loadlin can load Linux from dos. So get an install cd, and use loadlin to load the kernel on it. Or, you could do something risky like copy the boot file from the bootable cd directly to a partition, then boot from the partition.

right well i screwed up a bit here mate i decided i could use partition magic this morning......

and now i cant even get into windows so i guess its time for me to figure out how to do this without a floppy a bootable cd drive or a working os on it....

You can try getting an adapter for your laptop hd, and plug it into a desktop.

i looked at those adapters but its safe to say that I simply am not willing to put even $5 into this to make it work

However on a good note my friend gave me two of his old laptops both are p2 233mhz one had 256mb ram and a 30gig hdd so i took those out and put them into this little laptop here making it much faster the good thing is now that windows boots in safe mode "windows 98 still" off the 30gig hdd he gave me so back to that loadlin.exe anyone know where i can find instructions to use it?

Loadlin:
loadlin.exe [kernel image file] [initrd if you use one] [options]
(if i had the kernel image file 'vmlinuz' on C:, w/ linux in hda2)
loadlin.exe C:\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro
You have to be in DOS or DOS-mode for it to work.