hi there,

he is my problem, i have been given a laptop with no CD drive/floppy drive.

So what i'm trying to do is boot up DSL on a computer and plug in a USB hardrive (the laptop harddrive with a IDE/USB converter) and then run the 'install to USB-HDD' then plug the harddrive back into the laptop and boot it.

but it's not working, can someone tell me how i can get this to work?

i have an external USB harddrive caddy, and a computer with a CD rom drive.

I want to install DSL on a laptop without a CD drive of diskette driver.

no my laptop wont boot to USB ... i don't think. it's an old PIII 400mhz dell latitude LS

Looking at some old dell configurations... I see those laptops were built without any removable media devices - it was expected you would use external floppy or dvd or flash drives.

The easiest install would, thus, be from a USB thumb drive (if you have get hold of one.) You should check the bios to see if it will support booting from a USB drive, as these books have to be recovered somehow. If it does - the very easiest install would be from there.

It may be possible to do the install from a ramdisk on the hard-drive... provided you haven't erased the previous OS.

I cannot see if there is a network card - a net install would be something to explore.

You will have a very hard time doing things the way you are trying.

You are trying to turn an external USB installation into a working internal IDE installation. All the sda's will turn into hda's and the drivers in the bootup kernel will be all wrong (for USB not ide).

it has a network card and i could do an PXE installation, do you have a how-to for a PXE installation?

the harddrive i'm trying to use is blank, so there is no OS.

Well that's a problem.

You understand that it was always going to be a problem getting any OS onto this machine. With no running OS currently installed, most of the fancy tricks are denied you.

You want to look at USB boot in bios. Confirm that this is not an option by actually looking in bios. This will solve all your problems in one go so is worth a bit of effort.

Another hack is to insert the HDD into another laptop - install to that laptop, minimally, then swap the drive over.

Also look at inserting the laptop HDD to an IDE slot on your other machine.

The idea is to get the auto installer to do as much of the work as possible.

After confirming that none of the above is possible - I'll look at what adjustments are needed to get the external install to work (somewhat) as an internal install. With luck, it will just be a matter of editing the configuration files to suit the new hardware.

hi there,

My laptop dosn't have USB support and I don't have a second laptop that i could install it on and then remove the hard drive and place it in my current laptop.

I tried something else before, but it didn't work either, I tried the 'install to HDD' option and then used sda1 as my selected location, but that didn't work.

I'm read to list to any other suggestions u might have.

OK - but I've never done this myself so no guarantees OK? At least this should give you an idea of what is involved.

You have an installation of DSLinux already on the HDD.
You will have to prepare it for insertion into the laptop.

The external HDD is currently sda - and grub will call it (hd1) or similar.
Make sure the correct partition is bootable (if you can boot from USB on any machine, you can test this simply by booting from the drive.)

You will need to edit the grub.conf and fstab to get the device names correct for the laptop.

Grub.conf:
(hdx,y) references need to be (hd0,y).
(sdx,y) references need to be (hd0,y).
You will probably need to pass things like noapic and nolapic on the kernel line. However, DSL has excellent support for legacy hardware - so you may luck out there.

fstab:
all sdax references need to be hdax.

(Hopefully you wont have to relabel the block special files.)

You will need to edit xorg.conf to get the display and HID settings right for the laptop.
Suggest you make sure it uses the vesa driver, a low res screensetting with slow refresh etc (it can be set properly on the laptop). Concentrate only on mouse and keyboard and hope you don't need drivers. A touchpad you can take care of later.

Any questions?
(Say, "No Simon.")
Good - go for it... and lament that you have but one sanity to give in the name of digital freedom. Good luck, and may Patina guide you.

Here is a different way to get this installed. I've done this so I know it works!

Get a 2.5 to 3.5 ide converter. Throw it into a computer and boot the DSL CD. I did disconnect the other Hard Drives in the computer to do this. Once the CD is working, you can cfdisk the HD, and then install DSL to the Hard drive. Once finished, just put the harddrive into the laptop.

Now the problems you may encounter....

The laptops mouse.

This happens to be the only thing that I had a problem with once I got DSL onto the HD for my laptop. (Laptop is a PI 133 w/ 16MB Ram. I installed With a PIII 500Mhz 256 MB Ram machine.)

I'm currently getting ready to wipe out this HD again, to install the newer version of DSL on it. Currently it has version 1.2 on it.

This will work.

hi there and thanks for your help, but i managed to find a friend and borrow there laptop, install DSL on there laptop using my hard drive and then transfer it over.

Sooo... BIOS would see two IDE devices, you tell it to boot off the one that isn't your HDD?

Remember: this laptop doesn't have a boot from CD option in BIOS.

Spoilsport

Well done - it is amazing what you can get off a friend: remember -
A friend isn't someone you can just use and discard - a friend is someone you can use and use and use...

Actually what I meant was to put the Laptop HD into another computer altogether. Sorry about the confusion. You would take the converter and the laptop HD, and put them into a differnt computer. Disconnect that computers HD and boot to the CD. Install the DSL onto the laptop HD and then move the laptop HD back to the laptop.

Ah right - turn the lappy HDD into an internal desktop HDD, install normally. Instead of, as was being attempted, turning the lappy HDD into and external USB drive. Fairy nuff - and the converter may be useful for other things later.

It also struck me, since lappys seldom have more than one IDE port anyway, to replace the HDD with a CDROM drive... (may work if this laptop is actually a cutdown version of an expensive model (cheaper by removing components) - then the bios can still use a cd drive if it sees one.) Boot DSL with the "toram" option... remove the cdrom drive, add the hdd, then install to hdd from the desktop. May work... but I wouldn't hold my breath over it.

Things can get even more convoluted than that.

However, in the end, the easiest path was taken. It is often simpler just to steal... sorry, borrow another laptop.