I am trying to install 10.1 onto my laptop. The problem is that the laptop doesnt have a built in cdrom drive and it cant boot to a USB cd drive. I am using a iomega zipcd drive connected by USB 1.1. I was able to boot to the 9.1 install using the hdcdrom_usb.img, but the install froze repeatidly. I have given up on that version and moved to 10.1 only to find that boot disk image had been removed and the cdrom.img comes back saying "no cdrom found". Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hardware:

Twinhead Laptop
RAM : 256
CPU : Pentium II - 233
Internet Connection : wireless
Hard disk : unknown - 4.5 GB
CD / DVD ROM : USB - Iomega ZipCD
Video card : On Board Trident - shared memory
Sound card : on board

Your best bet may be to resort to installing over the network...

Could i do that over a wireless network easily. I dont care if it will take a long time. The computer doesnt have an ethernet port.

I have a netgear ma111 v1 usb 802.11b adapter.

Thanks

Wow talk about a crippled system.

A WiFi install will not work for you, especially with a USB WiFi adapter.

Ok in your shoes here is what I would do...

Erase the contents of your hard drive altogether.

Create a seperate bootable FAT32 partition, just big enough to house the contents of the three "download" or four "Official" CD's.

Dump the contents of all three CD's onto this partiton and boot to DOS.

Then run the Mandrake installer allocating the remaining drive space to swap and Mandrake (mounted as "/" root... nothing else).

Get everything up and running, including networking, etc.

Once you have EVERYTHING up, but especially networking. you can then delete the FAT32 partition and reformat it for Linux.

You can then mount it, say under /home to house your own files.


Note that you are also a bit light on hard drive space, but given the above you CAN run a workable Linux install.

That worked great after I managed to get USB support in dos. I managed to save space by copying only the /isolinux/alt0 folder, booting with hd_grub image and then having it run all.rdz. I was able to erase the entire drive during the install so i didn't waste any space.
Thanks for all the Help

I have managed to overcome the same problem with Mandriva 2006, without having to copy anything onto the hard drive. The answer is on linuxforums dot org, but I'm not allowed to post a link to it - will do so when I have made 5 posts!!

The article title on that site is "Mandriva 2006 Install from USB CD Drive"