I recently found my old laptop I used in high school and part of college in storage. It is a very old Dell Latitude with a 400 meg HD, 24 megs of RAM, no CDRom drove, and no network interface. I thought it would fun to install Damn Small Linux on it; but obviously face the challenge of getting it on there. I thought it might be possible to hook up the HD to another laptop I own and install DSL using that laptop's CDRom drive. Would this work? Would the HD be able to boot once it was put back into the original Dell? Any thoughts?

Any distribution, including DSL, will configure the software it installs to the hardware of the machine it is being installed on. When you move the hard drive to another machine then whether it will boot or not depends on how compatible the hardware and the hardware configuration on the 2 machines are.

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Steve Stites

Then I am guessing it will not work, since the hardware is vastly different between the two.