I will tell you all briefly about my situation.

I have a notebook and a desktop at home.And I formatted my notebook's hard disk because I want to install linux.However,my CD-ROM went out of order suddenly.To make the matter worse,I cannot buy this CD-ROM drive again because it's too old! So,I want to ask you guys if I want to install linux on this notebook,what should I do?My notebook has these I/O available.

1.Floppy drive.

2.External PCMCIA CD-ROM drive(But it wouldn't work under DOS.)

3.LAN card(It also wouldn't work under DOS.)

So,do you guys have any suggestions?Any suggestions are appreciated.

Please try your best and answer my question.Because I have been struggling in this problem in a very long time...And I can't fix it.

Hello!
In the olden days, when I had a 486 w/o cdrom or lancard, I was forced to load slackware 95 via floppies. I suppose if you had some time on your hands you could do it this way. Look around for some older linux books, they may have a cdrom included with a distro already cut into convenient, 1.44 Mb sized chunks.

regards,
doug

you presuambly have linux cd's already , on the cd there should be a directory called "images" or something similar, which contain floppy drive images and instructions on how to use them try use the network one (if there is one) to try to recognise the lan card, where you should be able to install it from an NFS share on another system no problem

Slack has a PCMCIA kernel for doing installs over a PC card, not sure if it's only for a PC card NIC but it may find your CDROM drive?

www.slackware.com

Probably your CD-ROM still works. It just won't boot because of your system. Just get your distribuition boot disks (they're probably on the first disto CD, but you can get them from the internet also.), put them on the floppy drive, turn on the computer, and they'll install a standard CD device drivers ; from there on it's easy, just pop-up your CD on the drive, installation, etc... and (SURPRISE) if everything wents smoothly, Linux!

Otherwise, if your CD did really die (which i doubt, because it strangely happened only after the format), just get a new one.

I have a laptop with a pcmcia CD-Rom drive. I was able to install Slackware 8.0 on it with no problems (configuration is another story, but I won't go into that).

First comes the boot disk. The one I used was noted as one to use for laptops.

Then comes the root disk. also a floppy.

I also needed the pcmcia drivers disk. The installer will prompt you for this. Again, this one is on a floppy.

After the pcmcia drivers were loaded my CD-Rom came to life and I was able to complete the installation.

good luck.

First of all,thanks for you guys gave me invaluable suggestions.

I want to respond "superbondbond" 's message.My external PCMCIA CD-ROM is not included when I bought my notebook.So,this CD-ROM drive was bought seperately.Unfortunately,this CD-ROM drive is not a famous brand name,and I got really poor response from the manufacturer...
By the way,I can't really obtain an effective and suitable driver to boot this CD-ROM.Even I search for many driver on the internet,few of them support PCMCIA CD-ROM.And I've tried the RedHat linux 8.0 boot disk with PCMCIA support.But It couldn't detect my CD-ROM anymore.I'm really frustrated!!

Do you guys have any other suggestions?All I wanna do is boot the CD-ROM drive.If it's successful, the trouble can be thrown away.

Suggestions to you guys: Don't buy a product from infamous manufacturer.Because you will get no reply or very very slow reply if you need support from them.

Maybe my explanation was confusing.

My CD-Rom drive also was purchased separately from my laptop. It's not a "major" brand, but that shouldn't matter. If all you want to do is get Linux installed on your machine, then you should be able to do it as I did with Slackware 8.0

First. Download the disk images that you will need.
1) Boot disk. The one for laptops is named "bareapm.i"
2) Root disk. There's only one of these.
3) PCMCIA support. find it where you found the Root disk image.

These first three each go on a floppy. You also will obviously need the the iso burned to CD for the remainder of the installation.

To install:

1) boot from the 'boot' disk.
2) it will then prompt you for the Root disk.
3) It will prompt for optional supplementary disks. The PCMCIA support
disk is one of these.

Once the PCMCIA drivers are loaded, your CD-Rom drive should now be active, which you finish the installation from the CD. Keep in mind that I didn't actually "boot" from the CD, just installed from it. Now that it works I have access to the CD-Rom drive from Linux through /dev/hdd. pretty simple..

I too tried the RH disks with PCMCIA support, but had no luck.

If you want to give Gentoo a shot, you can check out the Gentoo Net Install Guide

Either these Debian disks or else Gentoo

The debian's a straight net install, while gentoo's a little trickier. You'll need this micro distro to get started. It's lots of fun, though.

hi
i installed rh 7.3 on my old compaq p1 .Put in the first cd of rh 7.3 while using windows
there is the folder of dosutils go into it and there is the utility of RAwrite of come thing like its name run it
it iwll ask u the path of the boot image most probable its /images/boot.img
also tell the path to copy the image a:
there its. u had made the bootable floopy if ur system dont suport the booting from cd under dos
there u can install loinux after booting from cd or there is alother file in the dosutils folder in the cd while makes an image so that u can install from the network using lan card
surely dont forget to test the midea first before installing
good luck

Hello,everyone. I have mentioned that I have a laptop which was using PCMCIA CD-ROM drive and want to install linux.Recently,I tried to install linux again and it works!I used RedHat Linux 9 to create a bootdisk in order to boot up my PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.Maybe it is a new distro so it supports much more drivers.

I am pleased that I can re-use my Pentium 120MHZ laptop to do my business again,rather than spending about 1500 US dollars to buy a new one.

Wow... for a minute I thought you were talking about microsoft.

My bad.

slight