On my laptop, I currently have WinXP and mdk9.1. I want to upgrade to 9.2 by doing an NFS install using the files on another computer. However, my floppy drive is broken and I would like to avoid burning a cd. I want to boot off the hard drive and install from there.

I've managed to get the files from the network.img image onto my laptop's hard drive. Now I want to boot from those files. I've tried putting them on my root partition. When I do this the system loads up normally except for using the installer kernel. I've tried putting the boot files on my /home partition and on a fat32 partition, but the system just hangs after the bootloader.

Is it possible to boot the installer off my hard drive?

No, in order to use the nfs to install or upgrade, you always need a startup or installation floppy. You have to copy the image in the floopy and boot off it. I don't think that you can use that image from the hdd.