I have a laptop (P133 with 40mb of ram), that only has one drive bay, i can swap the cdrom and floppy drives in and out of this bay, however i must restart the computer in order to do so. I would like to install mandrake 9.2 linux on this machine and use IceWM as my GUI. Now the cdrom cannot boot from cds, the bios is too old, if i took the cdrom.img and used rawrite to extract the files and placed them on drive c, could i manually run them in dos to start the installation? I have tried other distros such as vector linux which require me to place files off the cd onto the hard drive but i haven't had much luck in getting the cdrom to work in FreeDos or University Linux, i know the cdrom works thought because it worked in windows 95 before i formatted the drive. Any suggestions for the best course of action? If i am getting ahead of my self could anyone give any suggestions on getting University linux to see the cdrom? /dev/cdrom does not exist only /dev/cdu535 which doesn't seem to work when i go mount: /dev/cdu535 /mnt/cdrom. Any direction in this matter would be greatly appreciated.

What you need to do is a network install. Go to a mirror and grab network.img; it'll be in a place such as this:
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/d...es/network.img
(this will vary from mirror to mirror). Then you burn this onto a floppy. If you have linux handy, use dd (with if=<network.img> and of=<the floppy> like this:
google for "man dd" for more. If you only have windows, use winrar to write the image to the floppy. google as needed.

Next, you boot from the floppy, and after you enter the path to the hdlist.cz file on your favorite mirror, you enter the setup program, and the entire OS is installed over the internet! Sound difficult? Well, it kinda is. Getting the path to the list right can be a nightmare.

But once it works, you'll be quite pleased at what you achieved. Given an old laptop, a floppy, and a broadband connection (you do have a broadband connection, right?) You can have linux, like out of thin air! I fucking love network installs.

-axlotl
grr had to make a new username 'cause I forgot my password and the mailing script appears to be broken.