I have a very old laptop with a broken CD drive, so have I use an external CD drive to read any CDs. The problem is that since the laptop is so old, it cannot boot from the USB CD drive because the BIOS doesn't recognize the USB as a possible boot option.

Also, the laptop has no floppy drive so I cannot run any kind of boot disk.

Right now it is running Windows XP. I was planning on formatting the hard drive and installing Linux over it, but I can't.


I have researched this and all the solutions I could find involved using a floppy, which I don't have, or running it from the hard drive, which I am planning on wiping as part of the install.

So is there any way to install linux from the external CD drive even though the BIOS doesn't recognize it?

I would think one solution would be to make a separate partition on which I can run some sort of boot menu which has USB drivers installed. From there, I can use this menu to load Linux from an external CD drive. The Linux installer can then simply format the original partition, and it can leave alone the partition which contains the boot menu. If Linux successfully installs, I can then delete that boot menu partition and have a fresh install.

If I were to do that, how would I actually put it into action? Or do you have any easier solutions?

The solution that you proposed is a good one. You can install GRUB under Windows. This will give you a bootloader on the hard disk drive that is flexible. The down side is that you will have to learn enough GRUB commands to manually enter a boot command.

Actually the Windows boot loader is configurable to do what you want. You can edit the Windows file c:\boot.ini which passes boot instructions to the Windows boot loader ntldr.

If you have at least 9 GB of free space on your disk drive then I recommend that you do not wipe Windows from the system. You never know when you need to so something quickly that is easy in Windows and difficult in Linux. Under Windows use the Disk Administrator to shrink your existing Windows partition, then create an 8 GB partition and a 1 GB partition. When you install Linux you will put the system files in the 8 GB partition and use the 1 GB partition as the swap partition.

If it has a small enough hard disk, and a modern enough one, you can stick it in another system and install that way. Linux usually won't whine about hardware changes, so this usually works well. Just remove the hard disk from that system, insert the new one, and install normally. That's how I got it on my kiosk mutant with no CD-ROM drive or USB boot capabilities. Some hard disks will be in an oversized case, which needs to be gently opened and the cable gently disconnected and reconnected. This is done for shock resistance purposes. Outside, it may have a weird looking interface, but inside, it should be standard notebook IDE. I must advise you use extreme caution when taking out a hard disk that does not have a special door. If something won't come, let it go. Pulling will just ruin it. My friend took this advice, and when no easy way was to be found just yanked and trashed the keyboard cable and touchpad cable, and even bent the motherboard to the point of uselessness. If X windowing won't start, well, look for other means, or use puppy, which will run on just about anything. OR... get used to command lines. My server uses command line only. Hey, it's a server. That's all it needs. Good luck!