I just inherited a (circa 2009) laptop.
I cannot boot via CD/DVD, and the flash drives aren't working properly.
The drive does have a "Lenny" install.

I did manage to transfer the netinstall ISO image to the internal drive, but I cannot figure out the parameters to boot from the hard drive.

The netinstall image lives on /home/iso
and it is running under VERSION 1 of grub

(I am a stroke survivor, and am, thus, a perpetual noobie)

Try this: http://www.teachmejoomla.net/code/li...-from-hdd.html
Also look at this sections 2.4-4.6: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/
You might find some answers here too:http://knoppix.net/forum/threads/115...t.ini%29/page2
By the way what is wrong with the CD/DVD drive?

Regards

Do you want to boot the netinstall iso from the hard drive?

If so, loop mount it. If it is named netinstall.iso you would do as root: mount -o loop netinstall.iso /home/iso. You should then be able to navigate to /home/iso and see the isolinux folder. Go to that folder and open isolinux.cfg and post the first boot entry. You should be able to boot an extracted Live CD from Grub Legacy. You would need to make sure that the stage2_eltorito file is in /boot/grub of Debian. The grub files are usuallyin in /usr/lib/grub or /lib/grub. I don't have Debian installed so I don't know where the files are. I'm not sure if this will work with a netinstall, never done that.

I boot a Puppy Live CD that way. This is the entry for it on sda8 which also holds PCLinuxOS. Puppy is pretty simple.

Some people use grub4dos.

Like I said, is had just inherited the thing. I don't know exactly what is wrong with the cdrom, I just know is that it wouldn't work. Same thing with booting from the USB stick. I can read and write but I could not boot from it, even though I can boot from another computer.

Well, even though the laptop hadn't been upgraded in about a thousand years, the original owner, my wife, had never deleted any of the archived *.deb files, so I re-installed all of the *.deb files and brought up the system, such as it was. I moved the static IP addresses to DHCP and I was back in business with upgrading everything to current STABLE Debian.

I still haven't found out how to reboot from the ISO, but I didn't find an answer that addressed the particular questions I had.

Thank you, everyone, in helping me with your advice.

You got a general answer in my post above to your general question. It would not be possible to give you any more specific information without you providing the exact name of the iso, the contents of the iso when loop mounted and the isolinux.cfg entries.

Anyway, glad you got it working.