i have a thinkpad 760eld with 16 mb ram that im trying to install linux on but it has no flopppy drive and the BIOS doesnt support booting from a cd.

ive searched the internet and theres some information on the topic but its very confusing.

i did try smart boot manager but it comes up with the message disk error 0xAA.

I have never used linux and dont know much about it. I know the basics of computers, but im not a computer nerd so bear with me and try to explain things, i am a fast learner.

Any help would be most appreciated!!!

Well seems you're not afraid of challenges, I see 16MB of memory doesn't give much moving space, if you'd like to run X and have a graphical desktop...well, try out, you never know.

I guess your choices are somewhat
- a network install, except that you'd still need a bootdisk of somekind
- borrow a floppy drive from somebody to boot the thing and use other install methods
- take the HD out and install it on another machine; I have never tried this myself and doubt if it would work all right.

hmmm... so if i were to buy a floppy drive for it, i checked on ebay and there like 10$, what type of linux would i use and where would i get it and how would i go about installing it?

deli or slackware if you still want a challenge. Both have a floppy boot disk option.
Download the deli ISO and burn the CD. I assume your using windows to burn the CD so you will need some kind of app and so I suggest isorecorder if you do not have Roxio or Nero. If using either one be sure to select burn CD from image option. Once burned view the contents in the isolinux/sbootmgr directory and there is a readme.txt file that explains how to create a boot floppy.

http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/
http://www.slackware.com/

thanks for explaining that. thats probably what i'll do but i just want to know is buying a floppy disk drive the only way to go? isnt there someway i can boot from a cd or isnt there someway i can load linux from "inside" windows 95 or can i hook it up to another working computer??

No way to boot from CD since your BIOS does not support this function. You can try booting from windows 95 using loadlin via this method. You will need to copy the floppy boot image to c:\
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html

you can install FreeBSD completely from floppies using an internet connection. just put a cheap pcmcia etho card in and give it a rip.

can someone explain using loadlin in more detail??

I have been trying this challenge myself, although my 760ELD has a 73MB of ram instead of 16.

Firstly, you can do a CD install, but you have to install a smart boot to the MBR of the hard drive. A normal linux install will wipe out the Smart Boot MBR. This is not generally a problem because for an install you only need to boot from the CD once. On Debian and probably lots of others, you can arrange to not over write the MBR. When you boot, the smart boot loader will load up. You can select the Linux Partition and then GRUB or LILO can take over. (GRUB for Debian.)

(MBR is the master boot record. It is the first program a computer loads when booting. Smart Boot Loader replaces what would normally be in the MBR with a program to allow the operator to boot from a variety of ther places. GRUB and LILO are Linux boot managers along the same lines but designed with Linux in mind and not being used to boot anything you may have.)