Can anyone point me to a how-to or tutorial on how to install the contents of a loaded boot/root disk to the hard drive of my 755CD?

If I can copy that minimal install of linux to the drive, then I can boot linux with the CD-Rom in, and (i think) run setup/install.

I've tried booting with hdc=cdrom, It gets to a point where it is looking for the cdrom. If i swap it in, it is recognized, and the boot continues, but then I have to swap the floppy drive in again to load the root disks. After boot, swapping the cdrom drive back in again and trying to mount /dev/hdc to /mnt/hdc (for example) just lags the system for about 30 seconds.. Maybe I'm doing something wrong there?

Any help appreciated! Sorry for my linux n00b-ness.

Computer is a IBM ThinkPad 755CD

Does your distro (or laptop) not boot from CD rom?

Darren.

No, the cd-rom isn't bootable. :/

Okay, I'll post how I 'fixed' this.
I d/l the windows 98 se boot disk from this website:
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Booted off the disk, copied the disk contents to the C:\ drive. Then I edited the Config.sys and autoexec.bat files to load from the C:\ drive instead of the A:\ drive.

Then I downloaded the autoexec.bat from IBM, which gave me info on how to setup the soundcard and CD-ROM drivers. I also downloaded the CD-Rom driver from ibm.

After I installed the drivers, I put a debian cd in cd /install/ and typed boot. (I either couldn't do this w/ the slackware install cd or I missed it and saw it on the debian install..)

Install...worked... it validated all the packages, then after it got though some of them, it started saying they were corrupt, but I'd run it again, and the 'corrupt' package would get installed and the next one would be labeled 'corrupt' I did this until it installed everything.

My problem now is that I couldn't get dselect to install (which I'm familar w/ from Mac OS X/Fink) x11 and other packages, I'm not sure if it was a hd prob or a cd, but I re-downloaded the .iso again when it was being lame and saying packages were corrupt. So I burned that ISO, and reformatted the linux partition and i'm re-installing now. ;D

-crosses fingers-