One thing you can try if you're not afraid to open up your computers, is to take the hard drive out of the notebook. Drop the notebook hard drive in your desktop, you'll probably have to buy a notebook hard drive adapter, and install linux using your desktop hardware. It's a real round about way to go about installing it, but it's something I would do (It IS something I have done
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Another thing you can try is to run linux from an FAT partition and use loadlin to boot your system. There's a slackware distribution called zipslack that fits on a 100MB zip disk, but you can also just unzip it to the root directory of a bootable FAT partition and run it from there. It won't be as fast as an ext3 or ext2 filesystem, but it will run.
That distribution can also be installed to a zip disk and has a boot disk that you can make that has drivers for accesssing a zip drive precompiled in to the kernel. It requires a zip drive, though. What's nice about putting it on a zip disk, is that you can take the drive and disks to another computer and boot linux on those computers as well. It's like what Mandrake has done with their Globetrotter distribution.
