I have a Windows XP computer and a laptop with a broken cd-rom.

I want to install Mandrake 9.0 onto the laptop (with NIC) , how can I do this without using the CD-Rom?

I have no network setup and the laptop hardrive is formatted and clean.

TIA

Alistair

yes thats a bit of a problem.

you have a working floppy on the laptop?
if not your stuffed i think.

I have no idea how you would do it under XP

but if you had linux on you pc you could share the install cds via nfs and use a boot floopy to install onto the laptop.

Yeah, I have a working floppy disk on the machine and a cd-rom that does not work. I could in theory network both machines together and do a network install of windows on the other machine. But I would prefer only Linux on that machine.

Is there a Linux on a floppy disk? If so maybe I could install that and get it working then network connect to the XP machine and network install Mandrake 9.0?

TIA

I've read this solution once on MandrakeForum. I did not try, so make sure you know what you're doing:

1- Take the hard drive from your laptop,
2- Remove the hard drives from your PC, and put the laptop's hard drive instead.
3- Install Linux on the PC with the laptop in mind: select the packages to make sure that all packages needed by your laptop's hardware is installed (eg: PCMCIA); also: choose a console boot, not a graphical boot (technically speaking, boot in runlevel 3).
4- Put back the hard drives in their proper places.
5- Boot the laptop, login as root, and reconfigure your X server.
6- Start X (startx) and use Mandrake Control Center to make sure all other hardware is well configured.
7- If all is well up to this point, you can put your laptop in graphical boot mode (technically speaking: runlevel 5 at boot).

Good luck. If you don't feel this is the solution for you, go and check what is available here:
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/

Yves.

I thought about doing that but when I took my laptop HD apart I found that the connectors are not the same as my PC so I couldn't use that one in the PC.

Is it possible to install a floppy distribution and then connect to an ftp server to download the rpms to my HD and then install from there?

I have been looking at Trinux to do this.

Would this work?

Thanks

If you can network the two computers this link may help re doing a network install:

http://www.club-nihil.net/mub/viewtopic.ph...rk+installation

Also, you could try doing a hard drive install by transferring the install CDs to a Fat partition on your laptop and following the procedure here:

http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/install/ihdinst.html