oldthinkpad

I've been having real trouble getting Mandrake onto my old Thinkpad 760xd The laptop has a cd-rom that is not bootable. I can swap the cd-rom with a floppy but I cannot use them both at the same time. I have 48 megs of ram. I tried to copy the cd (directories, not the iso file) to the hard disk to install Mandrake 10, then to boot from the floppy to install. I was told by the installer that I needed additional drivers to access my hard disk. It's a generic ide hard disk. Googling around leads me to beleive the file ide-generic.ko should be there but is not. I don't know how to get that file to a floppy. My next stop was to delete the Mandrake 10 disk and copy Mandrake 9.2 to the hard drive. The 9.2 boot disk was able to read the hard drive and found the files I had copied. Unfortunately, I'm told by the installer that the machine does not have enough ram to install from a windows partition. The next step was to make a linux boot rescue disk that I found on the internet. Mount the windows partition, make a new ext2 partition and copy all of the files from the windows to the linux partition. The 9.2 boot disk was able to get to the hard drive, find the files, but it still gave me the not enough ram error. Looking at the logs, it did recognize that the files were on an ext2 partition, but it gave me the windows partition error. From the logs it seems that in order to read from the hard drive it has to make a ram disk and the 48megs I have is not enough to do that. My next step was to delete 9.2 from the hard disk and copy a vectorlinux cd to the hard disk. Vectorlinux installed and I'm looking at an icewm desktop now. I do not find this thing user friendly at all. Between trying things, going back to the big computer and googling, I've spent at least 14 hours total getting this thing installed. I've used Mandrake 9.1 or 9.0 about a year ago on a spare desktop computer and it seemed "ready" for use by a marginally technical person like myself. Here in vectorlinux/icewm, I figure it would take me another 15 or so hours to figure out how to install programs and to find programs that work with vectorlinux. So after the essay, my question: Is there a way, given that I already have a fully working Linux kernel 2.4.22 with all hardware recognized and a 200 meg swap disk already made, for me to get Mandrake onto this thing? I'd prefer Mandrake 10 to be able to say I'm using the 2.6 kernel, but I'm not that choosy. Mandrake 9.0 would be fine. I would like to boot the the console and skip all the hardware detection stuff and go directly to the actual Mandrake install screens, that I've never seen on this go round. Is that possible? Moved to laptops by Ixthusdan