THE QUESTION

can i take the hd out of my laptop,
mount it in an external usb case,
plug that into my desktop running rh9,
and somehow prepare it,
so when i put it back in my laptop it will happily begin installing as though the hd were the installer cd?

i dont know about partitioning.
i havent even been able to see the usb hd on the desktop.
(i plug it in and "nothing happens".)

this must be possible.
maybe even easy!
what do you think?

DETAILS

i have a cute toshiba 3010ct laptop that runs win98 like crap.
i want to load any distro. one that runs as fast as win98 once did would be nice. just for browsing.

there's a site that described how to load debian on it, but i dont have the external floppy with the queer connector.
there's a usb port for which i can enable "legacy usb support" but that didnt seem to make any attempt to try to read my usb floppy.

so im left with a network card, and.... an external usb case for a laptop hd.
there is no network boot option in the bios.

dual boot would be nice, but not necessary.
i have partition magic.

> can i take the hd out of my laptop,

Yes

> mount it in an external usb case,

Yes

> plug that into my desktop running rh9,

Yes

> and somehow prepare it, so when i put it back in my laptop it
> will happily begin installing as though the hd were the installer cd?

Hmmm. I'm not sure if you can do this exactly, but you CAN prepare that hard drive so that it's possible to boot into a fully functional RH install. For now, your biggest problem seems to be getting that drive recognised by your system. I don't have any USB drives, so I can't help you there, but I wanted to suggest posting another query here that deals with JUST getting that drive recognised (some USB guru will likely help you out) - once you can see it and write to it, you can move on to installing RH.

P.S: If your laptop used to run Win98 at a decent speed, then it still can - I find Win98 runs a lot better if you do a clean install every six months or so (either that, or don't install too much on it - get it running the way you like and then leave the system alone). Scanning the system for spyware and junk with adaware and/or spybot is also a good idea.

check the mandrake website, I got an email a couple of weeks ago that they are releasing a USB harddrive with linux installed on it but you gotta use a boot cd or something