i recently purchased a IMB ps/1 (just to screw around with)

im trying to install linux on it

i replace the HDD witha spare blank one i had laying around

it wont recognize the cd drive i put in it


soooo.....im wondering if there is a way to install some distro (other than Basic linux) onto this computer via floppy.

I'm not aware of any full blown distros who's installer's still support it. That doesn't mean there aren't any though. You could use Zipslack, which is a scaled version of Slackware. It's available on the official Slackware CDs. With the Slackware 10.1 there are 35 floppy images, not counting the 3+ required to boot and get the installer going. It's intended to be installed on UMSDOS partitions, Zip disks, LS120s, and such as that and only weighs in at about 90mb installed.

If you want something more, then almost all the distros support being installed across a network using FTP, HTTP, and/or NFS. So if you have a 2nd computer available to use as a host, I'd do something like that instead of fooling with the floppies even if it meant buying a cheap network card or 2. You can pick up trial versions of FTP/NFS servers for Windows if you need to and Apache is available for Windows for free if you op for HTTP. You could also concievably install the entire OS using a remote mirror if you have the bandwidth to support something like that.