Hi this little laptop doesn't have a cd drive. Only a floppy drive and there is no usb ports so how can I install say Damn Small Linux or? Whatever other distro. I think it only has 8mb ram (but maybe more?) 100mhz cpu and I can't remember the hd size. A friend just gave it me tonight and she told me it wasn't booting into win98 anymore. It stops at the win98 screen and that is what I saw when I started it tonight.
Can I stick the hd into my laptop, install linux and then put the hd back into the original machine?
Would be nice to use this little machine and try to convince more people to use linux.
Oh I do have a pcmcia network card so that might be used?
Oh also I heard some time ago that there was a linux that fit on a floppy or floppies?

DSL might be a good choice. They also have this page: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i.../Boot_Floppies

so there you are. Knoppix might also be an alternative. I guess you might be able to get the network pcmcia card started from a floppy and then access another machine over the network in order to get the installation done. DSL site might provide more details.

Ah went into the bios and there is 16mb of ram actually. Can't see what the cpu is. There seems to be conflicting info on the net as to what this machine is. It says on the lid it is a Toshiba Satellite 100ct but all the sites imply that it is a Libretto. That doesn't sound right because the specs of the Libretto says it has a minimum of 32 mb of ram plus the sites says it has win98 installed and this machine started out with win3.1. My friend said then she put win95. The latest was win98 but she has had the machine in storage and it stops at the logo page and doesn't go fully into the desktop.
I looked at that link but it seems it starts out using a bootdisk but you still need a cd drive.
I tried this site tonight to get debian http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...h04s03.html.en but the machine gives me this 'Non-system disk or disk error Replace and strike any key when ready'. Ofcourse I set it to boot from the floppy drive in this instance and when i go back to booting form the hdd it does so but not to the desktop ofcourse.
Not sure where to go from here as i have never done this before.

Installing from a desktop machine would probably be easiest in your case. I myself have a system without an optical drive and connecting the hard drive to a desktop is the only way I have managed to install an OS.
16MB of RAM really limits you in terms of distros you can use. If you really want DSL, which isn't a bad choice, you will have to install it on another machine, as you don't have enough RAM to run it live to make the HD install.

Yes i have heard that I can install from a desktop but so far don't know how to do it. I have gotten a few distro names that are appropriate for this old machine but so far the information is incomplete so i have not gotten far. I have smalllinux075.tar.gz but not enough info to do anything about it. I also got a 4 floppies worth of stuff for debian(root.img, boot.img, net-drivers 1 & 2) but also no instructions on how to actually go about installing. The page i got those files from did explain how to extract to the floppies and that worked but when I put the boot floppy into the machine i got that common error...something about non-system disk and to remove it/replace and strike any key.

Oh... Did you write the images to the floppies(not just copy the files onto the floppy)?
You need to use rawrite for windows or dd for Linux to write the images to the floppy. It will make the floppies bootable.
I haven't used rawrite in many years, however I can tell you how to use Linux dd.
It works like this:
As you probably know in UNIX devices are represented with so called device files so it's not really that different to the system whether source/destination is just a file or a device.
To write from a file to a device your source is your image file, and your destination is the device, in your case it's probably /dev/fd0. So you would get something like this:
Assuming you are running the command from the directory where your image file is, repeat for the rest of your images and floppies.
Good luck and let us know if you get anywhere.

As for connecting the laptop drive to a desktop PC, if you know your way around inside a desktop, you will simply need a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter, like this one:
http://www.vista24.biz/ebay/lermart/s4p/lrbc181ent.jpg
Or this one:
http://www.1topstore.com/images/prod...-adaptor-1.jpg
If you are located in the United States, there are many you can get for under $4 on eBay. It's a handy thing to have anyway, never know when you find yourself recovering/backing up data from a broken laptop.

Yes I did the dd .....command. I use linux mainly and have windows on another computer that I do stuff offline.

Yes I was going to get one of those adapters for another laptop that I need to get data off and they are cheap. If I use one of the adapters wouldn't it be a bit difficult as the hardware is different in the laptop compared to my desktop.

As far as I know most distros still copy the kernel will all modules to the drive, even if not all are probed. However in my experience all distros I've probe the proper modules for new hardware on every boot.
And yes I've swapped in a drive from an ultralight without optical drive into my desktop to set up Linux and it works fine on the laptop. Of course there are things to pay attention to like fstab and X configuration file (xorg.conf for X.org, don't remember xfree86), and bootloader configuration, and probably a rerun of alsaconf. Other than that it won't make any difference. It's all a matter of getting the files onto the laptop and getting it to boot at least into the text console so you can do the rest from there.

OK well I will be in touch here in the forum when I get the adapter. I am such a newbie still to linux so I appreciate the help/advice!

If you don't mind me throwing my two cents worth in, I have had some sucsess with installing to laptops without optical drives (the one I'm thinking of is also a tobisha, but I can't remember the model).

I used PXE to boot DSL from another machine on the network. You need a special version of DSL to PXE properly (somthing about sending the whole intrid file) otherwise all you get is a crippled shell. When booting you'll need to boot to the command line (no X means less RAM usage so there's more for the ramdisk) an install from there. I seem to remember that if you do it like that the installed system also dosen't have X, but once it's running I apt-got it.

Thanks but most of what you said is over my head. I am just not experienced enough. I decided to just install win3.11 on it and give it to a friend that is sending some old pc's over to his country where no-one can afford them. I am just running into some problems with install win3.11 but that is not for this forum.
I wasn't able to get the adapter either and really I need to spend time on other things.
Thanks everyone!

If you're looking at doing several of them, mabye an extrenal parrelel drive bay or CDROM is the way to go. They hook up to the parrelel (printer) port, but they are also hard to find now (as new ones are all USB). You might find one on ebay.

If you want a nugget of wisdom on win 3.11, I've found that going through an installer with 3.11 is a waste of time. Insted, find a running system, zip it up (from DOS), transport it to the new machine, unzip it and run win.com from DOS. This works becuase before win95 all windows where just shells to DOS, so if DOS works so should windows.

Yes I am aware that I could get an external cd drive that way. I have had a couple of these old Toshiba's before but I am pretty broke and not prepared to spend money on old equipment.
I really don't know how to work with dos. I am afraid what little I have done was with complete instructions from someone and even then I didn't understand what was happening. I kinda of missed that time in computing. So ultimately I really don't know much of what you said. I do know what zipping or unzipping is but i am used to working with GUI's. I know what running something is too but I have no idea when something works in dos. I don't know what is a good/positive result. I just don't know dos.