In the Windows 95/98 times I remember formatting a HDD with /s to make it bootable. On the HDD I would then put the win95 or win98 folder so that all someone had to do to install from the HDD was

cd win98
setup.exe

Now I'm faced with a situation where doing something close to this with Linux would be easiest for me. I don't care what distro it is and I don't care what version it is. All I want is to be able to format a HDD, make it bootable and install Linux without a floppy nor a CDROM (my hardware is toast and the only thing that will load is a HDD).

Does anyone have any insight, ideas?

There's always the boot from network option... (if your bios supports it and if you have a box set up to push down an image)
But if you are just doing one machine then take a CDrom out of another box and load up linux and remove the CDrom when you are done...

Here's a thread that may help:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=75349