Hello,everyone! I have a thorny question to ask all of you. Please advise solutions.

Background:
I bought a dell notebook few months ago without CD-ROM & floppy drive( out of budget).I have pre-installed Windows Home and would like to install Fedora Core 2 now.

Questions:
However,how can I boot the installation disk?I know that I can use USB pen drive as installation bootdisk and my BIOS supports it.The problem is that even fedora core 2 website provides insufficient information regarding this.Do you guys have any experiences about this?Next solution,if I buy a IDE->USB cable along with my desktop DVD-ROM drive,can I boot that drive?If it goes well,I can eventually boot with CD and install them.I have asked vendors but their answers are different.One says you can boot the disk with DVD-ROM drive and other says no.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

It can be done. This message describes how to make a bootable USB disc from a Linux system. Since you have only that other OS, you would need to use a browser to download
bootdisk.iso

I hope you can use rawritewin.exe

to write the image to the USB drive. That should allow you to boot the installer and it should have an option to install from ftp, http or another server.

***This is my best guess*** If you get it to work, please write it up for others.

RobertP,I'm seriously considering your suggestion,however...

I downloaded rawwrite,iso image.Rawwrite has only one option to write to the floppy drive.As I mentioned before,I don't have a floppy drive.Moreover,the iso image bootdisk.iso is not acceptable for rawwrite.

Hope you can explain much more in-depth about this.Thanks.

I have followed the instruction,format the USB pen drive to FAT->copy all the files from the isolinux,remove & rename all the necessary files->boot from USB drive.But the laptop complains that, "No partition table to boot" something like that.What can I do now???

couldn't u hook up the laptop to desktop via an ethernet cable and do a networked installation of dekstop's drive?

If your USB drive can be formatted like a hard drive, perhaps it can be partitioned... with fdisk?

See

Bootable USB drive . I have not used one of these. I was thinking it behaved like a floppy...

So. You can burn the relevant .iso to a CD on another system and copy the files to the partitioned USB drive. You need to mark thepartition bootable with fdisk.

webazoid,I'm interested in your ideas.Would you mind explain it in details?

sorry...no clue...but i've read that u could theoretically do it...

I do think Fedora Core 2 without sufficient documentation about how to make a usb pen drive as bootdisk.

All I found after googling is full of unsuccessful stories.Maybe I really need to buy a IDE->USB cable to boot from CD.

I have little progress regarding bootdisk (USB pen drive).

The problem comes from BIOS.My Dell notebook has a option (Quiet boot/....With dell logo or something).I chose the latter before.I guess that would bring up the MBR from the Hard disk no matter how I set the boot sequence.Anyway...

The USB pen drive can boot up but end with "no kernel image".I followed RobertP's suggested website
.What should I do if it requires kernel image???

Please give me some advice and I will try to find at the same time.

RobertP,thanks for your website,I've figured it out.

I nearly gave it up because I have spent a great deal of time to fix this problem.The website mentioned:



The bold area should be amended to /mnt/usb/syslinux.cfg.cfg,not sys!!!!

Maybe using USB pen drive is rare nowadays when everyone has CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive...

Thanks anyway,the problem has been solved.