Okay here is the sit rep. I have a IBM ThinkPad 570 I received froma friend. It just has MS-DOS. It has no floppy drive, a usb cd-rom, and a pmcia slot nic card. So far I have dropped on my hard drive the image files for a floppy boot disk with usb cdrom support. I then downloaded Grub for DOS. I can load the Floppy image from my harddrive and access the cdroms files. BUT, it stalls out with an error during the install.
So what I am presently at is I ran the rescue linux system off of floppy? or cdrom? and I have linux running off of a ram disk. I have loaded the usb driver for my cdrom and mounted it and the 2 partitions of the hard drive.
My major question now is how do I install from the disk. Is there a file or command that I can use from the rescue linux to access the install files on the cdrom. I can see the files, I can copy the files, but I don't know which files are for what.
The distro is Mandrake 9.1, 4 gig hardrive, 192 meg ram, Intel Pent II.

I have searched the web in all ways I could think of ... but they all require either a network or a floppy boot install disk.

Any help would be appreciated.


PS. the install error message is as follows:

error in exec of stage2 :-(
trying to execute '/usr/bin/runinstall2' from the installation volume,
the following fatal error occurred
FATAL ERROR IN STAGE1: Not a directory

Present location:: hot, sandy, camels, can you guess?

somewhere near me

you should have a package manager, or an rpm program, if you copied that and all .rpm files, or whatever package extension is, you can install them.. in slack i copy all tgz files, and use pkg tool to install to the laptop then put it back into the laptop, but it would work copying all tgz packages and the extracted package installer to the hd, then from the laptop running pkg tool on the base pkg directory, now i'm not sure how that translates to mandrake.

what part of the installer do you get stuck on?
where or how are you mounting the install cdrom?


the easiest way is to throw the hd into a comp with a bootable cd drive, install and then stick it in the laptop..

Well I am in Scania ... just down the road from you.

Well, I have found out through a little more digging during install that the problem might have been a bad cd. So I redid it on my Desktop. Same problem. Otherwise I have figured out how to do it so far.

What I did for anyone in a similar sit is this:

I have dos on my system at the least, on a fat32 start, at least.
I then downloaded the grub for dos program. using said program then I boot the images from the cd-rom, by having a copy of them on the harddrive. preferably you have some way to copy them. I had to do it through a windows environment. My trouble was that I have no floppy and a single usb port that I have a zip cdrom attached to. my dos cant see a usb but my windows could.

okay so we have this so far out of that gibberish. you have the image file from the cdrom for alternate boot methods on the harddrive. you can boot into a natural dos system. you have grub for dos.
you then use grub to boot the images with support for usb drives and poof it will install from the cd.

my problem is that I didn't realize that my cd had gotten to badly scatched to install from the main install program.
but I will try you suggestion on doing it manually from the rpm program.

I did install from these disks on my desktop, but I haven't figured a good way for my NIC to function yet. So it is just sitting there at the back of my drive and I run my Windoze part.

ok, i have ibm thinkpad 570. it has no cd rom or floppy. i has win98 on it, but i can not get to it, because it was not shut down properly and then it hangs on the scan. i got into win98 once, but then i pulled out an ethernet card and then it hung. ever since then it has been hanging on the scan like i said before.

i got a usb cdrom. for some strange reason, i thought the thinkpad could boot off that cdrom. i do not think it can.

finally to the question? if you can answer any of the questions it would be helpful.
how can i get access to the win98?
how can i install another os?
can i do a network install? if so how?
is there anyway that i can boot off the usb cdrom?
is there anyway i can access the computer without using the floppy or th cdrom?

thanks in advance

well I have been busy. I am now back in the states. I did solve my problem with the laptop. What I did was borrow a friend's laptop and switch harddrives. install a basic dos system with grub for dos, and placed a basic floppy linux install image on my disk with the dos. minimal install was 35 MB.
I then switch the drive back into my computer, boot and load grub, boot the linux image, get my usb supported install program running and install the linux system.
I know this seems a long and twisted way to do it. I didn't have the proper resources to try a network boot and install. but I had a usb cdrom and I begged my friend loan of computer. The reason I did not install while on his computer the linux was this. PARONIA. I was afraid that had I installed the linux on his system. The basic install would not function properly on mine a different system.
That may or may not be true. So, I did the long measure you see before you.
I now have an IBM Thinkpad 570 with a 4 Gig harddrive running Mandrake 9.2.
My next trouble is upgrading to a new harddrive. I have no more laptops around that I can cheat off of.
oh well ! best of luck to any who follow!