Hi, just received an old laptop but it has no floppy drive and buying one is out of the question, so i would like to know if there is any way to install linux without a boot disk

Do you have a CD ROM drive? If you have one, then you can boot it off from an installation CD.

yeah, nowadays the Linux distributions don't even come with floppy boot disks...only with bootable CD's, so I guess it ought to work for ya, , unless it doesn't have a CD-rom either...then ehmm...I hope you got Ethernet or you're gonna spend a lot of time downloading the software to install it, hehe.

zLiNuXz

by laptop, do u mean one of those chunky ones made with normal pc parts? coz if so... cant you afford $4?

LOL,
maybe he works at mcdonald's 3 hours a day for 1 buck an hour,

Hey thanx for the help, shoot2kill. And banelion, a floppy drive for this particular laptop is around £80 due to it not being made anymore and on a paperround salery of around £12ish a week this is a long time to wait for a shitty piece of hardware. (by the way im only 15, so dont take the piss)

Wow truly amazing linux bootable CDs...............

I install windows 3 times a day!

i know this guy in real life and the laptop is an old 486 made of non standard parts and we cant find out how 2 get into whateva form of bios it has

I have a rather new ( it's 2 month old , so tecnicaly it's out of date ) dell laptop , and NO FLOPPY DRIVE

this is a major problem, i am trying to install drake 9.0

the unit wont boot the cd , i don't know why , it does with everything else.

it has no floppy drive, the floppyimg program in the images folder in the cd1 doesn't help , it just tells me i have no floppy drive..

is there any way to fool the computer , and burn a Boot cd with the "boot floppy " data on it ?


cheers for any help..

( oh and no , i ain't buying a floppy drive either , outdated, noisey and just bloody slow. and a £60 for a usb floopy that probably wouldn't be bootable it's just not worth it. )

If the CD drive boots other CD's then either the MDK install CD is corrupt or it didn't burn correctly.

If you downloaded the ISO's verify the 5d5sum matches the one on the download website.

yup.. it was a bad burn... ( cheep cd's )

i have just downloaded mandrake 9.1 so that me just online now... it took no time at all..

my sound card , network card graphics even my usb external HD was detected and installed with out my knowlege..


i thought this was linux ... it was going to be somthin for me to learn


it;s done it all for me..

bloddy clever..


ali,

you guys should always buy the highest quality blank CD's...trust me it makes a difference.

I actually have come across Blank CD's, that have expiration Dates!!!, it's true....after a certain date, if they haven't been burnt....they'll go bad...
it's those REALLY, cheap ones......the Silver ones that have no stiker....heheh, like 100 disks, for like 9 dollars.