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I have an older laptop with no cdrom or bootable USB. What's a way I can install a distro to the hard drive via USB with another computer so I can then put the hard drive in the older laptop? Thanks
I have an older laptop with no cdrom or bootable USB. What's a way I can install a distro to the hard drive via USB with another computer so I can then put the hard drive in the older laptop? Thanks
Yes, you can do that. No problem. Just don't use EFI, and make sure you install the bootloader to the actual drive in question.
That said, a laptop that doesn't have a bootable USB must be ~15 years old, you won't have much fun with a graphical environment on that!
Ondoho, so you're saying when I boot from USB on another box when parted, or whichever, comes up the USB drive should be a viable install destination? I haven't seen that before but it's been a bit since I went down this rabbit hole again.
So long as the firmware (BIOS/UEFI) enumerate the USB as a boot target, the install should proceed. Unlike ondoho, I always expect the unexpected. For example make sure you set the boot flag for an old BIOS even though the linux loaders ignore it, - I've even had one that only booted from a M$oft bootloader. Then there is the small matter of making sure you are supported - 32-bit ?, ATA drive interface ?. ... lots of potential snags. Can't do any damage to try, so suck it and see.
Ondoho, so you're saying when I boot from USB on another box when parted, or whichever, comes up the USB drive should be a viable install destination? I haven't seen that before but it's been a bit since I went down this rabbit hole again.
Just to wrap things up, here's what I ended up doing:
Used rmprepusb to install plop on the hard drive. Booted with plop, which supports booting from USB with USB 1.1 support. Booted from a thumb drive with Ubuntu mate i386.
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