Hi!

Just got myself a toshiba portege 2490ct (700mhz, 256m ram, 120g hd NO internal FDD or CD-ROM, NO built-in NIC) and decided to finaly make my linux leap with it, I even swore never to install M$ software on it.

I have managed to install Debian with the USB fdd compatible floppies but I really really wanted to give a shot at Gentoo...

Since all it's installation relies on the CD rom and I cannot boot from my USB one (not supported by bios or any boot manager I know of) I don't know what to do.

I read the boot disk howto but feel this is a little too advanced for me.

I wanted to use debian boot disks but it needs to mount the HD in order to install the PCMCIA modules I need to get my NIC running.


Therefore, would anyone happen to know a way of installing gentoo from such restricted media?

I have considered using Free DOS and loadlin but found out that DOS PCMCIA support was really horendous when you only use a boot disk (and there is no Free DOS floppy distro yet...)

What I seem to need is a boot disk that does the following:

- Must be able to load root disks from /dev/sda (I guess from there the legacy support from the BIOS doesn't cut it? Need a module for the fdd? not sure!)
- Load everything in a ramdrive
- PCMCIA support
- Network support
- FTP support
- Basically allows me to boot into ramdisk, get NIC working and get image via FTP so I can chroot to my HD and start installation.


TIA for your time, sorry for a little bit long post

Xcen