I know this question has been asked many many times, but i have been unable to find an answer.

I have an old laptop, with no cdrom (it hasnt got a hard drive either, but thats another story!), and of course i want to install Slackware on it.

When i discovered the lack of hard drive i tried to boot Slax live from a usb cdrom, but it would not work, Smartboot manager would not see the usb cdrom either, so i had a play with some of the floppy based distros.

Hal91 http://chris.silmor.de/hal91/ seemed to be the best, as it has some extra modules you can put on a seperate disk and load with insmod. Using this i was able to get my parralel port zip drive working. However this is based on an ancient 2.0 kernel, so i didnt think it would help with my cdrom!

Now my theory is, would it be possible to do the same thing for Slackware? Compile the modules needed to get a usb cdrom working, put them on a floppy and load them before running setup?

It sounds pretty simple, but im not sure how to actually go about it, or what modules are needed.

If anyone can help, please post back as ive been searching all day and not come up with any answers.

-KaYoS

Are you wanting to run live from the usb cdrom? I guess that must be what you want since you say you don't have a hard drive. I was going to provide a link to network install but that requires a hard drive.
Actually checkout the link: http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html
which is that network install but it has a link there for "booting your machine from network" If you have a floppy drive you should be able to load the modules you require that way too.

I only wanted to run live as i didnt realise the laptop had no hard drive untill i looked in the bios!

A network install is no good either, as this machine doesnt have any way to connect to a network.

I really would like to be able to install from a usb cdrom, and im sure others will too!

Saying you want to install is somewhat misleading since you can't install without a hard drive. You can run from a live cd or even a usb external drive if your bios lets you boot from usb. Some older computers are not able to do that. You might be able to boot from your zip drive with zipslack http://www.slackware.com/zipslack/getzip.php