Okay, I bought a SATA hard drive and an IDE enclosure (mistake). I have a laptop, so I can't use the SATA drive. But, I have a really old 450mhz PIII machine which has a ten gig IDE drive in it. The problem with this machine is that the CD-ROM drive doesn't work too well. This has resulted in my not being able to install Linux on it.

But now I can install it directly to the drive because I have an IDE enclosure...

But how do I do it? Can I install Linux on an external drive FROM WINDOWS?

Basically, i'm on a windows machine. I want to install Linux on to an external hard drive. I cannot install it any other way. Is this possible?

One more clarification: I hook the ten gig drive up to my IDE enclosure, and then hook that to my Windows machine via USB. Seeing as how I can read and write on the drive, can't I install Ubuntu on it that way?

Thanks.
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I believe as long as your laptop will allow you to see the drive during install, you should be able to boot the Ubuntu disk in the laptop and then install to the external drive (just be sure you're not accidentally installing to the internal one!). Once you reach the point of the install where it says to reboot, reboot, but unplug the drive before it can boot up. Then you should be able to put it into the PIII and it should automagically fix the hardware. Then just continue with the install.

Any other ways to do it?
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Is there any way I can do it through windows?
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If it has a PXE bootable network card, you might possibly be able to setup a tftp server on windows and install it over the network using a boot disk. Of course, I'd imagine that a tftp server is gonna cost you some money on windows...

Maybe use a Knoppix live CD to setup a TFTP server of the linux iso you download, then use the aforementioned PXE bootable network card to install via the network...

As long as your BIOS can detect the external hard drive before bootup, I don't see why you would have any sort of problem.