I have a laptop that does not have a CD-ROM drive. However, it does have a floppy drive (USB, but bootable).

I'm trying to install Gentoo on it because I've become very frustrated with Windows on a laptop. Normally it would be easy but obviously the lack of a CD is a big problem. A networked installation would probably be difficult as the laptop only has wireless access, not ethernet.

How would I go about making a "crutch" floppy disk so that I can install Gentoo off of an ISO saved on the hard drive? Yes, I have searched, but have yet to find a simple straight answer, at least for Gentoo.

hi filburt1 welcome to lq. have a read here

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=8690

and a look here

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...group_id=85629

these turned up from here

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...=Google+Search

good luck.

The first link requires creating partitions and other steps; is there anything simpler that can just launch the setup directly from the hard drive?

I just finished downloading the floppy image and created a disk from the image from that Sourceforge project and it booted successfully; I'm going to try copying and extracting the ISO to a new empty FAT partition and see if it will work.

The situation has changed slightly; I just bought a USB CD-ROM drive, but unfortunately my laptop will not boot from it.

So, how can I use a floppy disk to somehow boot to the CD?

At this point I've just said "screw it" with Gentoo...the lack of good, clear documentation and the necessary files made me try Fedora instead. And lo and behold, using their bootdisk.img and burning the ISOs as normal works properly when booting from the produced floppy disk.