hi,

i have a laptop which the cdrom cant work anymore.
i want to take out the hard disc, attach it as removable one thru usb. then format the old contents and hopefully copy a linux live cd distro inside so that when i put it back into the laptop, it can boot.

Question is:
1) is this possible?
2) if yes, what is the correct way of copying it and which version of linux works?


Thanks all.

Editted : Basically, i have a lappy with a hard disc which i can dedicate to linux entirely, the hard disc has been formatted and is entirely empty. the problem now is, how do i install linux OS when the lappy cdrom is faulty? Like i mention above, i'm thinking of installing linux into the hard disc by using method to install a live cd into a usb pendrive, put the harddisc back into the lappy and hope it will boot. any other recommendation method is much welcomed.

If you mean to install the operating system and then put the hard disk back, then yes this is possible. But if you want to copy the contents of live cd and then want to boot using those just like a live cd where your original contents of your system do not change, then I do not know any way of doing it. This may not be possible.
You will still need to take care that if you want to put hard drive in some other laptop, then find something which has similar hardware to yours. This is though not essential, but will help you get out of driver problems.

Sure it is possible. All you have to do is write a bootloader to mount and run your CD image.

LOL.

Any distribution is ok. But if you have got not enough experience with linux and want it to run out of the box for the personal use and do not want to tweak with it, Ubuntu will be a good choice. Even Open Suse is a good disto.

If you have good internet connection and can afford to download live cd for Ubuntu, then do it and go through the link that I am giving and follow the steps. This may help you to put your live cd iso in usb stick and boot from it. I used the method for booting from stick with Ghost for Linux. You may want to give it a try as well.

www.student.soc.napier.ac.uk/~05012779/slax.html

Another tool that you can look out for the same purpose is unetbootin on sourceforge.net.
This tool will also help you to extract the iso image on usb stick to use the stick for booting.

So basically, you have no cdrom and you want to run some linux.

Does linux have anything equivalent to a microsoft system prep (where you install windows, run sysprep, power down, then make a ghost image, then you can install it to any hardware and it will search for device drivers from scratch when you boot up as if it were freshly installed instead of a ghost image)?

@jim : haha, i dont know how to do that either.

@linuxlover.chaitanya & david: from the mention of hardware and drivers, i would like to know if linux is hardware dependant?cant i move the linux distribution after i installed it in a location?

@linuxlover.chaitanya : i've downloaded unetbootin and a smaller livecd distro, ie puppy. i've used both on my harddisc as a removable usb harddisc. i see the linux system files inside the hard disc now. i will unattached the harddisc from the removable case and fix it back into my lappy. hope it will boot.

unetbootin will help you. Do not worry.
Every operating system, be it windows or linux or any other, will need drivers for the hardware to function properly. So in that sense os is hardware dependent. But in case of linux, it will detect most of the hardware and install drivers for it. You need to install drivers for only few kinda hardwares. But if you install os on a disk and then want to move the disk to some other system with different hardware configuration then you will have to supply drivers for the new hardware. It will most probably detect the new hardware though.