Hi all!

So i am in this strange situation.I got my hands on a sony vaio PCG-SR17K.Its a very old machine(pIII -700mhz 256ram and so on).So the point is that i want to install Gentoo or any other linux distro on it Yeah but here comes the tricky part. How can you install an operating system with no bootable CD(The Vaio comes with a PCMCIA SONY brand CD but i dont have one... i have a firewire cd but it can't boot from it). The bios does not support Net boot or USB boot. I don't have a floppy(same thing as the cd). The only thing i got is a working crappy XP on it.

So any ideas?

P.S. Removing the hard drive is not an option I don't have a 2.5 inch hard IDE cable as well

I don't think you have any options at all in this case. You need to either get the proper bootable optical drive for it (which I imagine would be expensive), or a USB-to-IDE adapter that works for 2.5 inch drives.

As it is, you have no bootable devices and no way to access the drive directly. You may be able to write a bootloader to the drive from within Windows, but I am no longer familiar enough with that OS to say for sure.

Assuming you could write a bootloader and minimal OS to the drive from Windows, you could in theory complete the install over the network.

You could install the OS of your choice using another computer. Just remove the hard drive, place it into a computer that will allow you to boot from CD, and use that machine to install the OS, then just move the hard drive back. Just be warned, if you're installing Windows especially, do not install any drivers. Linux has never given me problems, but Windows will likely BSOD if you try installing vendor drivers and stuff before you put it back in the destination machine.

you could try installing using the wubi installer,
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ub...dows-installer

I am not sure if it will support the old configuration but you can give it a try.

No, that's not *really* installing Linux.

It may not be, but when I tried it, it was virtually (no pun intended) indistinguishable from the "real" thing. Might be OK under these circumstances?

In this case, you can't be too picky about what's an option and what isn't.

Best suggestion would be to borrow a friends laptop that has a working CD/DVD drive (or could boot from USB), and swap hard drives, temporarily. Do the OS load, and shove the drive back into the Vaio. It'll complain about video drivers, etc., but should let you at least get into command-line mode, to fix any problems.

Yes you certainly can, provided that your hard drive has enough space to hold the installation ISO. This is in fact the way I used to install Debian on my R31 (an old 2001 model of Thinkpad).

Here a quick howto:
- Google for Grub4Dos and download it. There are grub4dos and WinGrub but I would prefer grub4dos for the ease and simplicity of setting up. Two files you'll need is glrdr (the grub loader) and menu.lst (you know what it is, don't you). Copy those 2 files to C:\
- Append an item for Grub in C:\boot.ini by adding this line to it:
C:\grldr="GRUB Boot Menu"
- Now download your installation CD ISO and store it in C:\. You'll probably want a mini net install CD.
- Read through the menu.lst, and you'll find sample menu items which find and boot iso images from hard drive, just adjust the name of the iso to suit yours.

Warnings: If after installation of Linux, you mess up the MBR etc..., it will be a lot of effort to set things right again. So be careful. It would be better if you can spare another partition to install Linux and preserve the current Windows partition, for the sake of safety . Hope this help.

arf

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Buy the pcmcia cdrom.

Make a live usb on the memory stick if it will boot to the memory slot but I doubt it.

Set a usb flash drive to act as a floppy or maybe a cd.. Borrow a usb floppy drive.

You could get real complex and use some of the IBM tools to get pcmcia storage to boot. May be possible to get a sd or cf card on an adapter to boot. It has never been easy to get a pcmcia to boot in linux.

If you can get to dos you can use loadlin or even simply use zipslack.

If you can get to any floppy you can then use a floppy to boot to a usb or network.

By that time you could have taken out the hard drive and loaded it maybe.